You know that feel­ing when you liked some­one? That tin­gling sen­sa­tion that you often hear in movie dialogs but don’t quite know what it is?

It was this guy that I got to know back in the days. We can’t say we know each oth­er, but he has heard of me, and like­wise I have heard of him.

He mes­saged me one day in response to some­thing that I have post­ed in a forum. In that mes­sage was his con­tact num­ber. I sent him a text and it was a short exchange of mes­sages, noth­ing moved; this was a year ago.

As I was look­ing through my archive of text mes­sages, I saw a famil­iar unnamed num­ber. I mes­saged that num­ber again, and I got a reply. After a series of mes­sages exchanged, we final­ly agree to meet.

He came over to my place, I saw him try­ing to back off for a moment, but even­tu­al­ly he let him­self in. Per­haps he was sur­prised that my descrip­tion of myself was­n’t that accu­rate; I described myself as an Indi­an with big bel­ly at the age of 43.

So I ush­ered him to sit around, brought him some beer and we began our chat. We had a great chat, with lots of laughs and teas­ing. He gave me that kin­da feel­ing that I like, unlike the past where I meet peo­ple and we just could not engage in a con­ver­sa­tion, this was dif­fer­ent, and dif­fer­ent at so many lev­els.