Friends I have not met

How is it possible to form a close friendship with someone you have never laid eyes on?

It seems to me a blog is a good place to raise that question. The general idea is that people I have never met, and in the vast majority of cases never will meet, can somehow interact with me by reading my thoughts.

Notice I didn't say "IS it possible...", because I know it is. One of my very closest friends is someone I 'met' on a message board about two years ago. Come to think of it, I think our 'anniversary' is later this month.

Today, we had our second ever phone call. It lasted a bit over two hours and I don't think either of us wanted it to stop. The idea of a closer form of contact than we can usually achieve, with only about a second's delay between responses, was so precious.

It also made me crave the idea of actually standing in the same room as each other even more strongly than usual. No trans-Pacific time zone shift to deal with, no sitting and waiting while the other person types something (even though she's a pretty fast typist and I'm no slouch either). Just immediacy. A person right there.

And touch. I'm quite sure that when we finally meet there is going to be one seriously long hug.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, she's very happily married to a husband I have also 'met' who is a really great guy. This is no 'internet romance' we're talking about, just an incredibly deep and fulfilling friendship. With someone I got to know purely through the written word.

Amazing, isn't it? Neither of us really understands quite how it happened. Shared interests partly, shared humour certainly, but also similarities in our thinking that can't be easily defined. And I suppose a fondness for each other's writing styles?

It's scary to think that if I didn't use the English language the way I do, with my own idiosyncratic vocabulary and turns of phrase, I might not have attracted the attention of someone who has become one of the greatest treasures in my life. If I hadn't made THAT post to THAT messageboard, the outcome would have been different. Wouldn't it?

That's all speculation. I'm eternally thankful for the path that I have in fact travelled, because our paths crossed.