FOAMING FRIENDSHIP, PART 3 OF 5

• THE RABID ENCOUNTER •
If you’re a steady reader you know that I have a friend named Rabid. No kidding, that’s what is actually printed on her birth certificate.

Maybe you’ve picked up on the fact that though we’re bona fide friends, we’ve never met in person. We have a relationship I truly value, yet this person, this Rabid, only exists in the glow of my screen.

She found my blog a little over a year ago, and over the course of the last year I’ve subscribed to and read hers. I've even rifled through her archives. She’s read mine. We’ve commented and responded to comments. And through these bits of back and forth I’ve discovered a someone that I’m fond of. She’s thoughtful. As honest as they come. Cynical with a lighthearted streak. Intelligent. Bright. (Intelligent and bright are different things, you know.) Witty as all hell. And pretty. (Which I suppose is more annoying than great, but I’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t try to change people, so we’ll leave her as she is.)

We’ve joked (or maybe it was just me joking and she was serious) about meeting up offline. We’ve mentioned the things we should review when we find ourselves face to face. I was kidding of course, because meeting someone—fleshing them out—I fear can lead to disappointment (not for me but for the other party). And because I would like to exist as the Me I present on Remarks from Sparks, I merely played with the idea of a face-to-face with this cruelly-named person I legitimately consider my friend.

But then, last week, a wave of the atypical came over me and I behaved as I usually don’t. I toed outside my unadventurous norm and asked this friendly flicker of my monitor out to lunch.

At the end of an email so long that an average person wouldn’t be able to make it all the way through in one reading, I hesitated a moment and, with the kind of deep breath usually reserved for forays deep under water, I typed out, Got lunch plans on Friday? Smacked Enter, tapped out Meg and sent it off before I could reconsider.

Though I come off online as pretty brash and often inconsiderate, I' m actually mortified of inconveniencing anyone; so after I gave the letter to the courier, I promptly descended into freak-out mode . . . I so should not have asked her to lunch! What if she doesn’t actually want to go and feels obligated since we’ve thrown together this online relationship? What if she thinks I’m just annoying and presumptuous and says No? Why in the world did I send that?! I just put an innocent person in an awkward position! And for the next few hours, as I slogged through the nine hour drive to Elk Ridge, each time that my phone whistled with a new email, my heart lept a little. Was it her response? Was she completely creeped out by my invitation? Does she wonder why she’s wasted so many taps grasping letters making words in emails directed at me?

When her response did come I was a tad nervous to open and read, for I deal poorly with rejection and I was confident that this person would manufacture a really terrific, even altruistic, reason that she wasn’t free, kindly rescuing me from embarrassment and keeping her safe distance. Or that if she did say Yes, she was doing it just to be sweet, not because she thought it was any kind of good idea to hear my sayings as they actually fell from my lips and discover the shade of grey my eyes command. The brain in this head was in fretful overdrive although I really did have better things lined up to keep it occupied. Really.

Turns out what she wrote back was an acceptance of my invitation.

Oh my friggin’ gosh, I thought, I’ve got a date.