What Happens When You Connect With Your Missed Connection

Stopping to marvel at my handiwork, I felt the small swell of pride in my ability to turn the experience into something worth tossing into the abyss of the internet. For all I knew, he actually deserved to have nice things written about him, whether he wound up seeing them or not. But this — this was for me. The body of the post finished, I struggled with inconsequential details: should I list it as Brooklyn or Manhattan? Did it matter?

It didn’t — if he was the type to cruise Missed Connections, he presumably kept an eye on both. The title practically wrote itself: ‘To the blue-eyed man that works with his hands.”

Still gloating over my iCajones, I pasted the post’s URL in the subject line of an email, BCC’ed several friends and hit Send. It felt wise to prevent this message from becoming a round table discussion of my willingness to troll for construction workers on the Internet. My humblebragging was met with several replies, all of which praised my gutsiness before questioning my sanity. Delighted enough by my friends’ responses to be comfortable with the fact I’d likely never receive a reply from the man on the train, I spent the next hour riding the small endorphin high that accompanied my frivolous internet use — until another email arrived with a suitably short subject line: “Taller, in plaid.”

I considered leaving Pandora’s Box unopened — deleting the email in favor of savoring the mystery. But I made the first move and now, feeling obligated, opened his reply and read the few lines he’d sent me.

The email was short; not as carefully crafted as my post, but he made it clear he wanted to meet. The real gem of the whole thing wasn’t his response — but that his full name and website were included in the auto-signature. It didn’t take long to succumb to the lure of Google, drifting between the links so carefully cataloged by the internet.

I breeze past the very-private Facebook profile and cached remnants of a blog that had been recently deleted; assembling a Cliff’s Notes version of his life is not difficult. He’s a recent college graduate — an artist, it turns out. I find photos of him in classrooms and studios, all taken with the need to showcase the school’s credentials in mind. He’s handsome, broad-shouldered with several days’ worth of carefully cultivated facial scruff, hair slicked up in that messily-clean attempt at bedhead that no one actually wakes up with.

The more references to his art degree I see, the more bummed I am. I wanted him to be some kind of token; an epitome of manliness, the complete opposite of all the Weenie-Boys of Bushwick I kept seeing on the street. Their penchant for jeggings and carefully curated facial hair doesn’t do it for me. Let the mousey-faced girls with greasy hair piled in sloppy top-knots have them all — I’m looking for something like the person I thought I’d seen on the train.

Our chain of emails grows longer as I troll him. His final message includes a phone number; clearly, he’s tired of our internet peacocking and looking to get down to business. Still giddy and slightly flushed at the quickness of his response, I waste no time in sending him a text. Knowing there would be a friend staying on my couch for the next week, I told him his options were limited: either before or after their stay.

Tomorrow then. New spot I want to check out… Meet me at Pearl’s at 7.

Squealing, girlish glee begins to build in the bottom of my stomach — the kind I felt each time I got a boy’s number in high school, the anticipatory knowledge we were going to “hang out,” back when alcohol didn’t lubricate the awkwardness of first dates. The sensation moves from stomach to tailbone, stealing its way up my spine and out my mouth, the victorious “Yesssssss!” hissed into an empty room.

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