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This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

→ I had one more meeting and then I was going to O’Hare Airport to meet a woman.

→ Then, the two of us would take the train back together.

→ We would stop near my place to have dinner. I would see her to her hotel downtown.

→ This was the plan we had agreed upon on the internet.

It was a miracle we’d even met, really. When Nidhi had joined IndianDating.com (this was pre-Tinder, post-Obama), she had conducted a search for men 6 feet and taller. She was 5 foot, 8 inches tall and fond of heels and her partner needed to be taller than her. The 6-foot search left her with three matches: The doctor from Austin, the doctor from Newark, and the “entertainment agent” from Jersey City. Both doctors wanted doctors and the agent listed his company’s website (built with Flash) in his About Me section and had left his Favorite Books field blank. After a glass of wine, Nidhi grudgingly conceded an inch and searched for Indian boys 5 feet, 11 inches and taller. This had expanded the field to 14 eligible bachelors around the country. She combed through the remotely attractive bachelors, exactly six of them, and clicked the I Might Be Interested button for each. One of these men was me.

I had been gently forced to join the website. I was watching the Super Bowl with my cousin Rachna when she told me that two years was long enough to mourn my last relationship. She navigated to IndianDating.com and created my profile during halftime. We settled on a diverse catalog of photographs. One with my friends, one on stage at a reading, one of me playing the guitar. This was designed to exude that I enjoyed life and contained cultural multitudes.

“What do I put for religion?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Rachna asked. “We’re Hindu.”

“I’m not Hindu.”

Rachna scrolled down the list. “You could put ‘other’ and then say that you’re not very religious.”

“Is there no way to say I’m an atheist?”

“You’re an atheist?”

I nodded.

“Dude.” Rachna frowned. “You’re not going to find anyone that way.”

We searched for atheists. She was right.

“How tall are you?” she asked.

“I’m like 5-foot-10 and a half.”

“Let’s round up.”

“Okay,” I said.

I’d gotten used to checking the website on the bus after work. I read profile after profile of women who loved The Kite Runner and dancing and R&B and a night on the town but also kicking back and watching movies and snuggling, as if there was a template that they used to ctrl-c/ctrl-v their identities. One day I got a message that read:

So bleak.

I clicked on an ugly URL to access the Contact Manager in order to respond positively with whatever was available in the acknowledgment system while the introduction was still valid.

I read her profile.

Amelie1985 was way cool. She was into transportation systems and ran a blog showcasing user-submitted chairs in public places around the world. She had an eclectic taste in music and had worked to rehabilitate New Orleans after Katrina and admired Dorothy Parker, which meant the canned messages in the acknowledgment system weren’t going to work.

I upgraded to a Deluxe membership and crafted a message introducing myself, my work, my love for literature and philosophy, and my sincere hope that her profile name referred to the film. I included a joke about Oxford commas because it felt smooth to do so. But then I realized the date: February 14. Hesitantly, I wished her a Happy Valentine’s Day.

She responded almost immediately. She told me her name was Nidhi. She lived in Cambridge and asked me about my graduate work. She was interested in going back to school to get a PhD in media studies. She’d studied photography as an undergraduate and had spent time in Rome, during which time she’d become infatuated with a graffiti artist who painted a stencil of Audrey Tautou as Amelie throughout the city. Nidhi documented more than 20 photographs of the artist’s work with her camera and also mapped the points of Amelie’s face throughout the city in hopes that it would uncover for her a secret about Rome, but was left with a random scattering of dots.

I was completely smitten, of course. And over the next month, we graduated from email to phone calls, and decided to go on the most ambitious first date ever. She’d fly to Chicago. I’d buy her hotel room. And we would kick it IRL.

We discussed every detail because itineraries and reservations and times and addresses made it real.

On the way to the airport, I reread our conversations from the beginning, mapping the progression from the initial email to her flight due to arrive in half an hour.

We both liked to reveal pieces of ourselves through culture. She loved this podcast about toxic loans because it made a complicated issue accessible through amazing storytelling. I loved this book on ’70s suburbia because it employed subversive text on earnest imagery which is the closest thing I have to a personal brand. We both liked trolly art because what is art lmao. I soon became excited whenever I found a cool new thing because I needed to text her about it immediately.

She texted me: “Here.”

I walked into the airport and checked the boards. Her flight from Boston was marked as arrived. I headed to the baggage claim and searched for a bench out of sight from the descending elevator. These were her instructions.

“This is going to sound crazy,” she’d texted the night before, “but you can’t wait for me at the airport.”

“Where do I wait for you?”

“Okay, this is weird. I admit it. But I can’t just see you. Like I don’t want for you to be staring at me as I walk toward you like in the movies. Am I crazy?”

“Yes,” I wrote.

We were two Indian kids who never dated Indian people who had found each other on an online dating website for Indian people.

Of course this was like the movies.

I saw her before she saw me. Out of respect for her conditions, I pretended not to notice her. She looked like most of her pictures, except she wasn’t smiling for a photograph. She was in a foreign city, taking in the faces. I watched her curious eyes float across O’Hare’s large windows. She was looking for the guy that matched my pictures, the pictures and personality that she’d liked enough to book a two-hour flight to meet in person. When she saw me, she waved. I walked toward her. She wore a tan overcoat and a colorful scarf. She removed her red earbuds one at a time

We said hello and held each other’s eyes.

She looked at her suitcase as if to suggest we leave. We said little on the way to the train and I scanned my fare card for her. We made our way to my neighborhood. A few stops in she took out a book then shoved it back into her bag, remembering that I was there with her. I liked her smile better in person.

At dinner, she pulled back when our legs grazed under the table. After the first margarita, we tried to settle into ourselves. We tried to forget how improbable this entire situation was.

There, sitting across from me, was the woman who was once a set of pretty photos, witty messages, and a voice on the phone that was quick to laugh. This was incredibly distracting.

We swirled the night with anecdotes and tequila, coloring in the stories we’d alluded to throughout the month. After last call, I hailed a cab and we went to her hotel downtown. When the cab pulled into the hotel’s driveway, she invited me up. We checked into the lobby and discussed the next day’s itinerary in the elevator. Her room, we discovered, had two double beds instead of a queen. I sat on one and she sat on the other.

“Okay,” she said. “You can kiss me now.”

“What?” I asked.

“Kiss me,” she said. “Sometimes it’s better to just be direct.”

I shifted to her bed, set next to her, and did as she said. We kissed for a while then lowered ourselves onto the bed. The margaritas caught up with both of us and we eventually fell asleep.

The next morning I rose, desperate for coffee. She was awake when I came back with muffins. She was going to shower and then have brunch with her friend. She seemed different and unable to look me in the eye. Maybe it was the hangover, maybe it was something else, but it felt like distance. She said she’d call me later.

We met again that afternoon and did the museums and took the photos and talked about everything but ourselves. Culture is the best distraction. We visited the Field Museum and looked at a new exhibit on horses, admired the tiny penguins at the Shedd Aquarium, looked at old posters at the Chicago Cultural Center, and I drove her to Cabrini Green to look at the newly demolished site of Chicago’s most infamous public housing project. We brought our new distance with us to each location. After dinner, she took a cab back to her hotel. I went home.

The last day, hours before her flight, I told her I thought this could be a real thing — we just needed to spend more time with each other. Because how could this weekend not have worked? I told her she was beautiful. She said it was easy to find her beautiful because she had exaggerated features and big eyes. Anyone could find her beautiful, she said.

She told me that she wasn’t interested in pursuing anything further. There was the distance (she was referring to geography). It wasn’t me, she said. She’d just been through a recent breakup. There were a few more entries in her short list of breakup clichés but the reason it didn’t work wasn’t a cliché at all.

Apart, our digital selves sparked bright. Together, it was different. And make no mistake, we’d represented our interests and hobbies as honestly as we could. We flirted over texts and discussed art and ideas and confessed our secrets to each other. In the month I knew Nidhi we only withheld one truth from each other, as we faced each other, her grasping that suitcase as the train to O’Hare pulled into the station.

We were better online.

Keep exploring the Internet Time Machine.