At some point in early 2006 my phone rang
and a distant, familiar voice quoffled in my ear. It was an old friend, The Moz. He kept shouting "I've found her, I've found her" over and over again.

"Found who?" "Pinkie".

The Moz, Pinkie and myself had been members of the same circle of friends in the mid-nineties. The Moz and I had been students while Pinkie had frequented the same dodgy indie club we had. The Moz and I didn't speak more than every couple of months, but we were still mates.

The Moz had had a crush on Pinkie. There were hints of things happening but he got kicked out and moved away. Both had got on with their lives.

Two years, he said, it's taken me two years.

The Moz had secretly acted on his ten year old teenage crush. Her old number didn't work, and he'd lost her address, so he had tried to find her using the internet. It was before the facebook boom, so social networking sites mostly dealt in aliases. He had tried friends reunited, but failed to find her. He put her name and hometown into search engines. He had trawled fora and usegroups for bands that she liked and the things she was into, hoping that one of the cryptic internet masks would slip to reveal her face behind. Nothing.

He kept this up, off and on, for the full two years. He spent hours, days, no luck, no joy. Eventually he conceded defeat. I will never find her, he thought, late one night, as he kicked a discarded tin can in a darkened, brick-lined street. Light flickered as a train passed on the bridge overhead with a mornful rumble. He looked at the night sky and it started to rain.

"And then, just as I gave up, it was there in my Inbox". She had found and contacted him, despite his common name and near-exclusive use of a pseudonym online. "How amazing is that?"

I looked at my fingernails. "She asked after you a while ago", I said.
Silence.
"You know I've had her number the whole time, right?"
( cs1ca, Tue 18 Oct 2011, 10:56, Reply)