To Jennifer Graham I love Jennifer Graham

She made me Google it.

It turns out that you also went to Google, and as we also call it, you see what appears on your screen.

Llena de curiosidad, entered my website and learned some of my analyzes. So, Jennifer Graham of Lucas, Ohio, wrote an email to Jennifer Graham of Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

“It’s going to look extra special to you,” it comes on the same page.

August reached the end point when he opened it. Sent in front of my office, I contemplate an open garden: desalinated tomato plants with yellow flowers, small green calabazas which would die for the ice creams which were very attached to the Halloween period.

The verano will work before my eyes.

But in my entrance tape, this Jennifer is full of life. I happily explain how I was met and that she was also a writer and had four children, so how could she not contact me?

It was fun and self-critical to write everything correctly, using proper punctuation and, most importantly, not overusing exclamation marks. Added one of the columnists who had written for your local periodical, and my advertisement: “Yes, you are obliged to read my writings, even though you are not there. Thank you for paying attention to my current neurosis.”

I divorced and lived 900 miles away from my fathers and best friend, spending most of my days attending to the little children and their needs. This was long before COVID-19 existed, but you work from home as far as Islam is concerned.

Plus, I’m shy and socially awkward, the type of person who pulls a music book from middle school so I don’t have to engage in trivial conversations during midterms. But if I write algo bonito, you will respond. Hazme reír y seré ton amiga por correspondence para siempre.

So, of course, I read my columns and wrote to the other Jennifer Graham who, at 51, was mayor for two years. I had occasion to say that I had posted something about how surprised I was to encounter a Jennifer in the obituary section the first time, even though Jennifer had become young for this indignity. The Jennifer has participated in the sports pages, business, business section, now in science and technology.

At a few hours, I challenged with a broma: “Mantengámonos al margen de los obituaries”. And shortly after, an additional, wonderful notification from Facebook appeared on my screen: “To Jennifer Graham I love Jennifer Graham.”

Thus was born a fantastic friend, owner of technology and some parents who had chosen the same number five decades before, in a time when your friends lived on your street, or iban in your church, or felt at home with men who worked. with your husband. It was a time in which you could live your entire life without meeting a girl with the same full name as your tuyo, and it wasn’t some chico named like your dad.

The Internet facilitates conversations by freeing the boundaries of personal interactions. When you live more than 1000 kilometers away, you won’t be able to meet others in the cereal pasillo or in the college concert. You can remove the utensils and use your weight, your juanetes, your writing pad, your stomach problems.

Jennifer was quick to enter the fechas de cumpleaños de mis hijos and told me that this was not her daughter’s new arrival. After a while I guess he got engorged with what’s going on and he has to be his only person.

Before she and we pick up interchange cards, Jennifer sends herself emails with recorders of things they have to do. Please contact me by error. Once a month, I opened an email that said, “Schedule Cleaning.”

Our letters were a combination of rutins, charlas and confessions.

In April, when I llevábamos ocho meses intercambiando mensajes sin césar, wrote to me: “Don’t meet me well. It is more likely that there is an ulcer that breaks through in the posterior part.”

But there wasn’t an ulcer. Sometimes it is gastritis or kidney disease or a kidney infection.

Two weeks later he wrote: “There is something wrong with the pancreas. Maybe it will be a benign thing, maybe it will be minor…manchas in tomography. I envy a Christopher Columbus for a biopsy.”

The May media wrote: “See towards the hospital house. The diagnosis is bad. There is pancreatic cancer. Parece extraño escribir esas palabras. No doubt it will pass later. Maldita Sea”.

Parecia that, after all, we will not lodge ourselves outside the obituaries. And the other Jennifer, who insisted she be first (“I’m the original Jennifer Graham,” as she grandiloquently wrote to me in her first note), I found before her.

Helpless, tan lejos, thought that the only one I could do escuchar. The envied packages with articles to prepare, to improve, and to transmit one’s thoughts and words. We then send emails. But that’s the only thing that matters, not on that.

No leaks in Ohio.

I have a lot of excuses. After all, we don’t know the truth. Eramos “solo” amigas cibernéticas. You are more than 1,100 kilometers away, a 10-hour drive without traffic. Additionally, our mother was single and had four children at home. I’m in Ohio which is so complicated and so cute.

I also told myself that, in any case, it was most likely that she was not looking for me. You are all with your best friend, your family, your church and your community, who have united in a turn for her. What is the difference between my presence and my presence?

In June he wrote: “I would like to keep a moment in my diary open to take pastillas for the pain and accept guisos d’atún on the door to write one of my favorite people”. He found himself matured, but then he found himself with the greatest distraction.

For this reason, I already intended to write professionally. “If I film myself in a slow room, with a very disturbing feeling, that I cannot lose,” wrote. “In principle I really like it and have learned my dose of Valium and Xanax, but I have decided that a life of chemicals is not what it seems.”

Over the long period, the emails continue, even if your content has changed. We don’t want to travel to Boston with your child to see Cleveland’s game against the Red Sox, nor the fabulous book we wrote to the junts titulados. Querida Jennifer (Suya idea).

So, one day, no more, I received a notification on Facebook from Jennifer’s daughter: “Soy Mackenzie, and soy Jennifer’s other daughter. I will ask for a message to say that my mother came across this one of mine.”

On Halloween: I was less than six months after my diagnosis and 14 months after I first wrote it. I stand in the refrigerator and compose whiskey and new directly in the vase.

On my birthday, three months before, Jennifer had fallen into the brutal agony of treatment that her doctor had announced was primarily paliativo. So, I had to arrange to send a box of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream, which was later packed in alcohol by my daughters to form a fantasy girl in the kitchen refrigerator.

“Haz tu mejor baile de cumpleaños,” he wrote.

More late, more enteré than hacía cosas así para allos sus conocidos. Include him buying his brother a motorcycle. She became furious for 52 years while her children did not have a crecido, but I could not say that this is why they lost their last weeks of life or why they lost the love between all those who rodeaban. Incluso a someone to whom nunca había conocido.

Throughout the duration of our correspondence, Jennifer sent me other small gifts, including a jar of precious maple pot carefully extracted from her husband.

Your best gift, of course, will be to stay in your life. In the surrounded silos of modern life, an open door to another person’s life is something darkened, a gold bar that must improve as much as possible.

The other Jennifer also told me a mantra that will help me live.

I’m not in Ohio anymore.

She — and her efforts in later years — learn that the 90 years of love are present, that we should not waste time or rationalize when our friends are at peace, even “alone” Sean Ciberamigos. We must take advantage of any opportunity to convert a ciberamigo into a friend in real life.

Life is short. Write quickly. Luego sousete al coche y ve.

This is good advice for anyone. I’m not in Ohio anymore. Oh Montana. O Georgia. Dondequiera que mer tu Ohio. And when they go there, they send you a message from Jennifer. In the original Jennifer Graham way, the best person, the gustaría iso.

Jennifer Graham is an author in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.