I was fifteen years old, soon to be sixteen, when my parents got the internet on our family computer. This was back in the day before everyone was online, and I was hooked right away. I got my first email address; I felt so grown up. I would come home from a rough day of high school, in the throes of my teenage drama, and find refuge in the faceless world of internet chat rooms. I would stay up late, long after I got home in time for my 11 p.m. curfew, chatting with strangers. I’d listen for my dad’s footsteps, hoping he wouldn’t wake up to get water and discover me at 3 a.m., wide awake and typing feverishly. These chat rooms were exciting places where I could make connections with people and flirt in a safe way, considering I was fifteen and had practically no experience with the opposite sex.

One night I was in an empty chat room. I was bored and about to sign off, when on a whim I began posting the lyrics to my new favorite song, “A Long December” by the Counting Crows. A long December and there’s reason to believe / maybe this year will be better than the last. At that moment another person entered the room and typed back: I can’t remember the last thing that you said when you were leaving / now the days go by so fast.

First we swapped stats: 16/f/New Mexico for me (my sixteenth birthday wasn’t that far away). 27/m/Chicago for him. His name was Rich. And with that we were friends. We talked about our shared love of the Counting Crows, of music in general, of movies… we seemed to click on everything. He older, wiser, and mysterious. He was married, but that didn’t stop us from emailing frequently. We went from meeting in the chat room to exchanging weekly emails to exchanging daily emails. I told him he was my pearl, a reference to the lyric in “A Long December” – “And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters and no pearls.” He wrote a poem for me. This continued for several years.

When I was a sophomore in college, I went to Australia for the summer to study. One day while I was there I checked my email and had a message from Rich, telling me he was getting divorced. I was stunned. When I returned to the United States from my summer abroad we began talking on the phone daily. I listened to his heartbreak over the dissolution of his marriage, and slowly something else formed between us. A mild flirtation soon felt like something more. This person I had never met became the center of my emotional world. I had just been through a bad breakup myself, and he was my lifeline. We said “I love you.” Naturally, “A Long December” was our song. He sent me a mix CD that included three different versions of it.

After I turned twenty-one he came to visit so we could meet in person. I was nervous and shaking when I went to pick him up at the airport, but as soon as I saw him I knew things would be all right. He got in my car and I took his hand. It finally felt real. Later that year I went to visit him in Chicago. And then, fairly quickly, everything started to fall apart. I made a decision to go to graduate school in Ohio. He was too established in his career to leave Chicago. He told me he didn’t think we connected in person the same way we connected over the phone. I cried. We tried to stay friends, but hearing his dating stories was too hard for me. I couldn’t stand it.

Now whenever I hear “A Long December” my stomach clenches up and I think of being fifteen and lonely, typing lyrics in a chat room, and a love affair that was over before it ever really started. I just can’t bear to listen.