My eyes scanned the crowd in the arrivals area of Terminal 5 at Los Angeles International Airport. Then I saw her face, framed by a curtain of espresso-colored hair, peeking out from behind a cement pillar.
We had never met face to face, but I knew Stacy and everything about her. Her arms reached out to surround me and she squeezed hard. Her embrace contained the intoxicating aroma of jasmine, reminding me of stolen summer nights capturing fireflies. This hug, forged in two years of whispered messages and stolen phone calls, felt like a return to a place I had only dreamed of.
Two years earlier, on January 17, 1994, the Northridge earthquake violently shook her parents' Porter Ranch home, awakening her and her family from their slumber. After the earthquake, as the San Fernando Valley was adrift, there was no school at Granada Hills High School, no movies or trips to Bullock's at the Northridge Fashion Center. Instead, she sought solace from her boredom by calling America Online and joining one of the many chat rooms, looking for something to cure the monotony.
Meanwhile, a world away in Connecticut, a blizzard had painted the New England landscape white, dumping feet of snow and ice. Schools were closed for a few days and I also called AOL looking for an answer to teenage boredom. Hidden behind a computer screen, hoping to share a flirtatious moment with a girl, I joined a teen chat room. Almost immediately, I saw his username, Stacyface. She was very witty and had sharp jokes, rejecting every attempt at connection with a playful challenge. A ritual of adolescent hieroglyphics unfolded, etched in the flickering glow of the screen.
Pun1sher: Hello.
Stacyface: a/s/l
Pun1sher: 14/m/CT you?
Stacyface: 14/m/LA
The awkwardness that only AOL instant messages could generate lasted for an eternity. Then inspiration struck. What better way to demonstrate our existence than to share our voices? My heart beat like a war drum as I dialed.
“Hello?” she said, the air thick with nervous static.
“Hello,” I said. My voice was a mere screech trapped in the immensity of the phone line. My pubescent nerves did a pirouette in my stomach as we hung up, retreating to instant message heaven. Our hearts fluttered like trapped butterflies.
For months, we met on AOL and instant messaged each other daily. AOL became our confessional, the dial-up buzz that connects two souls across an entire continent. We called each other every night to talk about the trials and tribulations of our teenage lives. We mailed and emailed letters and exchanged birthday and Valentine's gifts. We called each other so frequently that we lived in fear of our parents when the monthly phone bill arrived.
A year into our digital friendship, I sat 3,000 miles away in my room, but one night I told him, “I love you.” Almost without processing it, she quickly responded: “As a friend, right?” Not wanting to upset our relationship at all, I said, “Yes.” In retrospect, we were in love with each other, but only one of us was willing to admit it. A year into this long-distance digital relationship, we told our parents it was time for us to meet. They decided that if, after a year, we were still friends, I would fly to Los Angeles and we would meet.
Back at LAX, Stacy hugged me tightly as her mother, Cheryl, came up to greet me. One of the strangest and most uncomfortable experiences you can imagine is getting to know someone so intimately after having talked on the phone for hundreds of hours without ever meeting them in person. Her family kindly allowed me to stay with them for a week and they showed this small New England town all that Los Angeles had to offer.
I was captivated and fell in love with Los Angeles: dinner in Beverly Hills with a tour of Rodeo Drive, tickets to “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” a Dodgers game, shopping in many of the stores on Ventura Boulevard, a day spent in Universal Studios Hollywood, I spent a day at Disneyland, shopping on Third Street Promenade and driving the Pacific Coast Highway with a tour of Malibu and visiting Froggy's in Topanga on the way home. Seeing Los Angeles this way made me fall in love with both the city and Stacy. We shared our first kiss before I left to return to Connecticut. Maybe it was that kiss that sealed our fate.
Another year passed and the time spent on the phone became a kaleidoscope of shared jokes, whispered vulnerabilities, and slow-burning pain that was blossoming into something undeniable. When I was a senior in high school, the path to where I would end up in college was constantly on my mind. I wanted to work in the entertainment industry. Los Angeles was a likely candidate, but so was New York. One day, three years after we started talking, Stacy explained it to me clearly: “I think if you don't go to school in California, there's really no point in us continuing to have a relationship.” Wow, the old ultimatum.
I started as a freshman in the Film and Television Arts program at California State University, Northridge, and joined Stacy at the school in August of that year. I told my friends and family that CSUN had a great TV program, which was the main reason I was there. But the reality was that I loved Stacy and she loved me; There was no place he'd rather be than with her.
The author is director of rights and releases for “Access Hollywood” and E! News. He has been married to Stacy for 17 years and has two children. They reside in Porter Ranch. He is on Instagram: @orourkesean
Los Angeles Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to hear your true story. We paid $400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find shipping guidelines. here. You can find previous columns. here.
