When she opened the door and saw him standing there
Her first thought was
Holy crap he's so obsessed that he swam the Atlantic!
Well, his hair was dry
So she realized this thought was not reasonable,
But she couldn't formulate a second thought
Because that's when the shock started to set in
And all she could say was
"You exist!"
Awestruck,
Reaching out to make sure he was solid.
It was just like she'd imagined.
His lithe, ******-trained body stood less than an inch
Above her own over-worked and over-fed frame,
And his brogue-heavy voice tumbled out
Without a type-face to give it cadence:
"You exist, too…"
Palm to palm they stood there,
Staring wonderingly at the other,
Unconsciously twining their fingers as though,
If they didn't hold on,
They'd flicker out like a computer shutting down.

On her fifteenth birthday she'd told him
"I'll be eighteen in three years. Then I'll come see you."
And in those days
The Atlantic Ocean didn't seem like such a big thing.
It seemed that its breadth was just a story moms told to keep their kids from wandering off,
From sneaking out and stone-skipping across its waves
Until they splashed up on some foreign beach.
Dimly, she thought she could flatten herself out
And fling her body so that she'd bounce her way across the ocean
Right to his door.
In those days
She was leashed by a modem,
Bound by the words typed out in real-time;
"I can't wait until I'm eighteen. We'll finally see each other."

On her eighteenth birthday,
She no longer wore her computer collar,
And she wasn't thinking about him
Or the Atlantic.
But looking at him standing in her foyer,
She couldn't quite remember
When two screens and a modem
Became too fragile to bridge two continents.
Virtual hugs crumbled under real life kisses;
LOL couldn't replace actual laughter;
Emoticons couldn't replace ****** expressions.
For all that she loved him,
Something was missing,
Lost in IP addresses and chat rooms,
Only to be found again
Dropping its luggage on her bedroom floor.