When I Met Oliver

Life can be cruel. It can makes us or break us, build us up or tear us down. For most of my life I felt like I was living in the dark. I was never happy. I had a good family and good friends. On the surface there was no reason for me to be so miserable. Yet most days I would come home from school in a deep depression that no one really understood. I always felt so alone and forlorn in the world. I had many fears, but one of the greatest was that I would forever be alone. So I never tried to meet new people because if I never had anyone, I could never lose them, right?

This almost self-destructive pattern followed me throughout my teenage years into college. Once I had my first boyfriend, which ended in a horrible break-up after we had been engaged three months, I was even more devastated and alone then before. I had finally done it. I had put my heart out on the line and it had been crushed to pieces. I was certain I would never be able to feel true happiness again.

Then I met Oliver. Oliver was a strange boy. He would float in and out of a strange trance, like he could see things other people couldn't. He was funny and quirky and very odd, but never in a scary way. He was also quiet and compassionate and caring. It was like he had been pulled from a strange fairy tale; he just didn't seem real. I talked to him over the internet for many months before we decided to meet. We talked about all the things we would do together. I shared more of my past with him than I ever have any human being on the face of this earth. He shared his story with me, in his own strange way. He was more than just a friend; he was special and he kept me holding on in my darkest hour.

The day I met him seems like a memory. He was so much like I imagined him to be. I couldn't believe that he wasn't a dream. We talked for hours about everything and nothing at all. We lay on our backs and watched the clouds go by and thought how unfair the world is sometimes and all the pain and suffering we'd been through. Finally I bid him good night and promised to meet him in the same spot the next afternoon.

I never saw him again.

I waited and I searched for the months to come but he never showed. There was no word; it was as if he was a ghost. I couldn't believe it. I had finally found the one person who I could relate to and he had disappeared even more completely than my ex-fiance had. I was crushed.

As the weeks past I slowly gave up the search. Sometimes I would find something he had given me, like a necklace or a poem, and I would wonder if he was alright.

Three months after his disappearance I opened my e-mail one day to see a message from him. I was shaking so much I could barely open it. When I finally did it was a poem. It made no sense and said nothing about where he was or what had happened. Frantically I wrote back. This was answered weeks later by a second, strange poem.

As the weeks went by I finally began to stop asking questions and respond in poems of my own. As I answered in these strange poems he began to talk, though not about our meeting. I continue to write these today and take comfort in the fact that at least he's alive.

So what has all this taught me about life? Mostly it taught me to let go. Whether I will ever know what happened to him that day is a mystery. Maybe someday he'll tell me or maybe one day the e-mails will stop coming and I'll never hear from him again. But I realize that's not what's important. The people we truly care about never really leave us. Though we may feel the sting of their physical absence, the old cliche is true that they live on in our hearts.

Learn more about this author, Nicki Marks.
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