Consider...me.

Hey, did you notice I'd mentioned that I'd been in an auto accident yesterday? I emailed him.  Does it really count as an accident if you got scared silly -- but weren't going very fast, didn't smack into another car, and your 99 Volvo wasn't really much more damaged than it was before the accident?

I should rightly have been accused of hyping it up. But I was using the accident to make a point.

Why the heck hadn't he written to ask me how I was?  Wouldn't that have been the polite response, even from a relative stranger (in contrast to what one expects from a strange relative)?

Then I wrote, with a faux touch of chipper, (no, not the woodchipper from "Fargo"), that I would respond if he wrote back, but wasn't going to initiate any more emails.

For the moment.

Possibly forever.

The fact is, I have no clue what happened between us, if something can be said to have occurred.

There was a  long conversation (close to an hour and a half), I believe.

Followed by emails that jumped back and forth like live wires across the ether.

And then dinner  -- oh, he's cute, I thought.

Why am I working so hard to keep the conversation going?

I defaulted to listening -- and questioning.

What was I afraid of?

At meal's end, several hours later, he said he'd had a great time, and wanted to see me again.

And yet the ease of the previous emails was gone.  Was it ever there, I wondered, to begin with?

Trust -- but verify -- that was Ronald Reagan's famous aphorism about relationships with the Russian (previously Soviet) bear.

Oh hell, after meeting bipolars and narcissists, small children in large men's bodies and men who tried to run their hands over my body after one date, I just verify.

Knowing how downright weird this courtship fencing can be, I asked him again -- did he mean what he said?

Why yes, he answered, with precision and every appearance of sincerity.

But his online seeking (why do people linger on dating websites?)  and the silence that has replaced his eagerness tell another tale.

It is, most likely, a tale I cannot decipher -- but shall accept, with just a touch of bitterness for the lost time and nascent wondering.  I wonder if I should simply accept that having access to quick and simple forms of communication can bring out the beast in all of us, if we aren't careful.

Then the choice -- what to accept, and when is patience called for? Sometimes there are unknown circumstances.

What mysteries lie behind silence -- anomie, lack of passion, self-centredness, lack of interest, disability, distraction?

Or is it that online we have become the people we most fear -- shadows of the true self to which we aspire?

One God, we say in the Abrahamic faiths.

Yet online, whether it be to voice an opinion or to score a mate,  we turn ourselves into godlings -- and scamper, treading on the feelings of others as though we alone were truly real.

I hope I am kind and considerate -- but who knows? The mirror we hold up to ourselves is always cloudy.

One thing for sure -- I am much more of a cynic.