Ten years ago Mosaab had chatted me up online, but it was brief passages over the course of a few days, and I had very little information about him at the time, so we didn’t even stay in touch, particularly as I wasn’t aware of what he looked like, nor did I have have his personal contact information to retain. By complete coincidence I encountered his profile last June and whimsically decided to drop him a line. We started communicating regularly and putting the pieces together, but to his credit, his mind is like a steel trap without the benefit of any documentation. He immediately remembered me and our conversations from almost exactly ten years ago, recognizing my face and name and this web site. To both of our amazement, I was able to find the chat logs in my archives and his memory was SPOT ON. It was excruciating, but fun, to read the logs back and discuss our ensuing lives with each other on the webcam. Not only did we laugh riotously, it almost brought me to tears on how sincere he had been to me and how indifferent I had been to someone who I didn’t think I’d meet in a million years, let alone ten. He was living in Sydney at the time, and I was living in New York. Now he’s only a few hundred miles away in Los Angeles (where I was born), so when he was up here in the Bay Area visiting his family last weekend he made sure we had some quality time together, surprising me of his quick stopover only a few hours before he serendipitously arrived. So we finally got to meet face to face (a longer wait for him inasmuch as he had known of me for far longer). Strangely enough, we also calculated that we had been in New York City at the same time when he was just a baby and I was a little kid in late 1979. That was the only time he has ever been to New York (he was born in London). He didn’t even realize that I had lived there as as a child. There are more personal details to the stories we’ve shared since we started comparing notes, but suffice to say that it was overwhelmingly sweet how it all happened, and against all odds, particularly because he had no idea I had even moved back to California until we started really communicating again.
