You find the strangest things in old piles of paper. I've been preparing to move to the new apartment. This time around, instead of just throwing everything I own into boxes, I'm trying to minimise the amount of stuff I have to transfer across the Harbour Bridge, and that involves going through my old piles of paper, some of which have lain undisturbed for up to six years.

Back when I was 21, I fell in love with this girl called Susan. I lived in Perth, Western Australia, she lived somewhere in Idaho. We met on IRC. This is one of those things you can generally explain to people who've been there, and everyone else just shrugs and says ‘You're weird’. Just go with me on this one, OK? If anyone wants to tell me how stupid online relationships are, I'll tell you the story about the girlfriend before Susan, who I met in a nightclub and who I still get sympathy about when I tell the story of our relationship to people in pubs.

Anyway, after a year of being virtually inseperable, Susan flew out to Perth and lived with me for three months. The first two weeks of that three months was enough for us to both decide independently that It Wasn't Going To Work, but neither of us were particularly good at the whole communication thing at the time, so an awful lot of that went unsaid for the whole three months. When she left, everyone tiptoed around me for a while because I should have been depressed, but really I'd already been dealing with that inevitable outcome for ten weeks, and I was pretty much over it.

The basic problem was that both of us were looking to get away from something, and found in the other something quite nice to run towards. If either of us had a moment of introspection (and to be fair, she did and I talked her out of it), we'd have realised that all the evidence had always pointed to us being really quite good friends, but totally incompatible as a couple.

So anyway, near the end of the three months, I wrote Susan a letter, so I could just get out everything that was on my mind without the hassle of it being part of a real conversation. I don't have a copy of the letter, but I recall it was quite bitter: She was over on a tourist visa so I'd been supporting her out of my own pocket for three months, after all. I accused her of never having had any intention of trying to make it work, something which in retrospect I recognise as being really unfair. She wrote me a letter in reply, and that's what I found in the pile of paper. I'd totally forgotten about that letter, I don't even have more than the vaguest recollection of what was in it.

I didn't read it this evening. I skimmed bits here or there, but it may as well have been written to a different person. Time does that to people. The me today is very different to (and very similar to, as well) the me of five years ago, and I imagine the Susan of today is too. But it's nice to know it's around, a reminder of a person I used to be, a memory of a moment in my history.

I've seen Susan since. She went back to the USA and joined the army. When I went to teach a Websphere course in Brussels two years ago, I hopped on a train and visited her on base in Germany. Next time I'm in the USA, I'll have to see if I can pay her a visit, and finally apologise for anything overly bitter I wrote to her, that time in 1998.