Someone has a crush on you!

I don't use my aol e-mail address all that much anymore, but every now and then I still get mail there. Mostly it's spam, and I expect that. I think it's been five years since I got a piece of meaningful mail in that box.

I got some mail there today, a grand total of two messages, and one of them was an e-mail with the subject line "Someone has a crush on you!" I used to get mail like this all the time when I was in high school, but as time went by, it came less and less frequently. I think it says something when even spammers have given up on you ever being in a relationship.

I would always open the mail and jump through the thirty hoops you have to jump through in order to find out who sent it to you and, in the end, never discover the identity of my secret admirer. I even knew, as I was doing it, that all I was doing was screwing over my other friends. You had to provide e-mail addresses of people who you thought might have sent it to you. The spam company then adds those addresses to their little list of people to spam. I knew that this was what they did, even as I was entering as many addresses as I could think of because I had to know who had a crush on me. If this person had taken the time to tell this random internet website that they had a crush on me, why shouldn't I do whatever it took to find out who they were?

I never really thought about what I would do once I found out who it was, if it was anyone at all. Perhaps I assumed I would recriprocate their feelings automatically, regardless of who the person was or how I really felt about them, and that, as I have always suspected it would, the internet would solve all of my problems. Unfortunately I never found out who sent me the original letter, and thus I will die without ever knowing who my true internet spam love is. I know who I would have wanted it to be at the time, and I know that what drove me to open the mail and to jump through the hoops was my misguided hope that it was that person, the person I cared about, that had sent me the e-mail to begin with. The odds of that ever happening are ridiculously low, and I'm sure that in the back of my mind I knew I was just on a wild goose chase, but I still hoped. It was what the spammers wanted me to do.

The thing I never thought about as I was jumping through the hoops was the fact that I had to jump through hoops to begin with. As if jumping through the hoops of finding someone to love in real life isn't hard enough, there I was, hunched over my computer at 2:30 in the morning, giving away personal information and pinning my hopes on the machinations of a computer program. If this program had had my best interests in mind, it would simply have given me the identity of my admirer. I wouldn't have had to enter any information but my name, and I would have been rewarded with my admirer's name simply for clicking on the link. Perhaps, though, the hoops of the website are meant to mirror the real world experience of finding someone who loves you. Or perhaps I'm an idiot.

Over time I got tired of the hoops, of navigating ten pages of filling in fields just to face ultimate disappointment. That's probably why the e-mails stopped coming. They realized I wasn't a sucker anymore, or that I didn't have that many friends whose e-mail addresses I could give them, and they moved on to other people, people with the same insecurities that I carried, but who had actual relationship prospects and who considered it worth their time to find out what the website knew.

I still wonder, though, who it was that initially set me up for the spam. Somewhere in the world is someone who thought enough of me to either tell a random website that they liked me or to put my name down on a list of people who they thought might like them. I wonder who that person is and what they've been doing since I was sixteen. I wonder if they even remember who I am, and if I were to see them on the street, would I have any idea of who they were. I wonder if we would shake hands or hug, and then go somewhere and get coffee or ice cream, or just sit and talk and laugh. I wonder if the spam would ever come up in conversation, and how we would react to that. I wonder what it would all feel like.

And I got one of those e-mails again today, along with a piece of mail about increasing my penis size. I clicked on one and I deleted the other. Which is which will be my little secret.