I’d like to share something with the rest of you. More than a year ago I was just hanging out on-line and out of the blue someone instant messaged me. Normally I ignore the random people that do that, due to the fact that I guess long haired white guys are appealing to gay men from India. Let’s just say my ignore list is filled with lots of names I cannot even pronounce.

Anyway I took a chance on this certain someone and started to chat with them. It turned out she was an honest to goodness women, who was not looking to meet a man in America to marry in hopes of getting a Green Card.

Over the next several days we chatted and found that we had a lot of things in common. Some how I knew even after just chatting a little here and there, that she was someone that I would like to meet. As it turned out she lived in another state, but she was in the same time zone at least.

We started to talk about meeting one another, exchanging ideas on how we could accomplice it. The idea that we agree upon was that we would meet, me coming to see her, make her dinner and then settle in to watch a movie and share a bucket of popcorn. Simply enough?

Well, for reason that we have now discussed and have resolved she dropped off the face of the earth. Needless to say that I was crushed, you might think that is kind of weird to feel that way about a person that you only chatted with on-line and a couple of times on the phone.

She and I talked a few times during the following months, and even with her half way across the country one time and all the way across the country another, I still had this feeling about her. A feeling that made me compare everyone I met, women at least, to this phantom female that touch me in a way that I cannot describe even now.

And just like before, out of the blue I was checking my voicemail there she was again after a long absence. I have the voice mail still saved. I called her back and we started we had left off. That feeling that was resting in the pit of my stomach grew stronger and rose up higher in my chest.

Now she is back at the point that we started this adventure and we talk every day. Which is something that makes each even brighter. I cannot think of going through a day at work or even just staying at home without hearing her voice at least once.

I bet you are all wondering what this all is leading to. Since I have been introduce to Tribe and this one in particular, I would like to ask this certain person a very special question. If she would have me I would love to become her Tribe husband. (I hope that is the right term.) Of course I would like to go through all of the motions of waiting for a special moment, in a place that each of us would remember for the rest of our lives and get down on one knee, take hold of her hand and look up into her eyes as these words slip from between my lips…

“Annemarie would you marry me?”

Just a note, I bet you think it is weird that no where in this I have used the big “L” word. That is because she and I have made an agreement that neither of us, no matter how much we want to, will utter that word until we can look into one another’s eyes when we do so. Because a word like that carries a lot of weight and loses some of its meaning when you read it typed across the screen with a blinking cursor at the end.