Day 205: Saturday, October 1, 2011

I finally talked to a different girl at party- a friend of a friend who I had always thought was cute. I could feel my heart pounding, which I hadn’t felt in a while, and I was sure I made a fool of myself then by cracking bad jokes in front of her to make up for my nervousness.

Afterwards my friends headed over to an izakaya (basically a Japanese tapas bar), but even though I was hungry, I had to bail out because I was broke. While riding my bike home, I thought about liking this new girl and the new possibilities it presented but, like always, in the end my thoughts drifted back to the girl who I somehow can't get over.

When I got home, I found the woman who I had just met at the party on Facebook and did a friend request. Afterwards I discovered I got another message from a mysterious stranger who had written me earlier that day. All that her original message said was, “We have the same birthday…” in Japanese. That's it. She didn't introduce herself or even say hello. After I checked her page then, I noticed that we actually did have the exact same birthday, which was April 14, 1981. It also said that she did flower arrangements for a living, so when I wrote her back to be polite, I sent her a photo of flowers that I had taken. This evening her second message to me said, “Thank you. Your picture made me happy. I was feeling down today.” I took a moment to let the strangeness of the whole situation sink in and then wrote back, "Me, too."