high school pen pal
I had a bit of extra time at work today so I decided to use it to clean out the email account I've had since high school, which I moved to from Yahoo. While sorting things into folders, I came across a series of emails I exchanged with a pen pal I had named Dave.
Dave was 22 when I was 15, which made our age difference seven years. He lived somewhere in New England, which was very far from where I lived, and worked I think in construction, though I recall he had a passion for coding and computers. I can't recall who emailed who first - I feel like the story changes tune depending on who it was - but I'll assume it was me, because... I don't know? 15-year-old me probably just wanted to feel cool and mature with adult friends. (24-year-old me now is making a really ugly face as she is typing this.)
We had a lot to talk about, having come from very different backgrounds. I was never very good at keeping anything up consistently, so my replies were always months late, but to be fair he was just as bad at it as I was. Our emails were long and fun to read and fun to write.
There were a couple of things I told him that in retrospect were not the safest of things to be talking about with an adult - those emails are lost now, since I abandoned the old Yahoo I used when we first started emailing. And I think at some point in college, I thought "should I be creeped out by this friendship?" and stopped emailing him.
But reading our old emails now, I don't feel like there was ever a threat or danger, which gives me a lot of mixed feelings. On one hand, I don't regret having pulled away when I felt suspicious. If there was any actual danger, that would have been a smart move.
And it's not like I could have known then what I know now, but... looking at the situation from a distance, I feel bad about having just ghosted a friend with normal good intentions. I feel bad about having left him hanging, and, if I ever crossed his mind in the years since then, I wonder what he might have thought was the reason why. I wonder if he figured it out. I wonder how he felt when he did.