She said I initiated the poke fest. As I recall, she reached out to me first. Strangely, neither of us remember poking the other one first. So we decided to blame Facebook.I proposed the ludicrous theory that, somewhere in Facebook's source code, there's a rogue application that's been randomly matchmaking people. It might have begun as a computer glitch, an algorithmic anomaly. But left unchecked by IT, the little rascal grew into an autonomous cupid, lurking inside the dark corners of a server, poised to strike. We were its latest victims.
"Maybe," she typed back through the IM window.
Yesterday, she gave me permission to blog about her. We settled on Poker Girl for her nickname. (And it has nothing to do with how she'd been steadily climbing the Texas Hold 'Em championship hierarchy on Facebook.)
We began bantering during the stormy weeks. Here in San Francisco, with the menacing dark sky threatening to unleash a Biblical flood, I went online to seek relief from my cabin fever. From 4,300 miles away on the opposite side of the coast and three hours ahead of my time zone, she responded to my words and pokes with her own. Little strings of text few back and forth between us.
Before long, her profile picture, a babyish smile beneath ripples of auburn tresses, became a regular feature of my days. She was my daily dose of human warmth, my hot cocoa in the January chill.
"What do you think it would be like if we meet in person?" I asked her in an IM session.
"Well, it would be awkward," she answered.
"Why?" I asked.
"The communication might be a problem," she said.
"Explain yourself, young lady," I prodded.
There was a pause. Then it came:
"Doll, I'm deaf."
This time, the pause was on my end. Scenes from Children of a Lesser God flashed in my mind. I remembered having a mild crush on Marlee Matlin's character Sarah Norman (image from Amazon.com).
"It's OK," I said. "I'll learn sign language."
I've been on literally scores of blind dates. But if I ever meet Poker Girl face to face, it'll be quite unlike any of those. Words are my medium. I know how to juggle them, command them, paint landscapes with them, and tiptoe along their nuances. Stripped of their power, I'll be the handicap.
But if we meet, I should meet her on her terms. When I visited Paris, as a sign of respect, I tried (to the best of my ability) to chat with the Parisians in their own native tongue. So if I'm asking Poker Girl to let me into her world, the decent thing to do is to learn her language and her culture.
I've been watching online videos from Expert Village on basic sign language. Last week, I learned two sentences that might come in handy for my first meeting: "I miss you" and "Can I kiss you?"
I also stumbled on a YouTube clip of two girls singing The Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" in sign language. (I was searching for this item because I was worried someone might have uploaded the footage of me belching out the same song at a neighbor's New Year Eve karaoke party.)
From this, I culled one more useful (albeit melodramatic) line I could sign:
No matter the distance I want you to know,
That deep down inside of me,
You are my fire,
The one desire ...
The troubled romance between Sarah Norman and James Leeds in Children of a Lesser God serves as a cautionary tale against what I'm foolishly considering. Common sense suggests I should just leave Poker Girl alone.
"Have you ever been rejected by a hearing person because you're deaf?" I asked out of curiosity.
"Yes," she said. "It happened several times."
I look at that face staring back at me from her profile page. In the shots taken inside a photo booth with a friend of hers, she was being goofy, sticking her tongue out, blowing a kiss at the camera. How could someone reject this vibrant ray of sunshine, I thought.
In another shot, she wore a chocolate-colored top with spaghetti straps. I noticed the delicate patches of freckles along her smooth shoulder and her bare arms. They reminded me of the cinnamon sprinkles on my mocha drinks. What would they taste like to lick off her, I wondered.
According to the CBS weather report today, "Saturday night through Sunday, another storm was to drop into the Pacific Northwest."
I sense another storm brewing inside me. It's all the more powerful, perhaps more than simple words can convey, because it's silent.
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