Originally written in Hungarian, translated by OpenAI
We were already going through our second round of being stuck within four walls, thanks to COVID. Sitting at home wasn’t exactly a pleasant activity: “going to school” hunched over a computer, staying in quarantine, even though you weren’t sick… It was a pretty lonely way to spend time.
By the end of 2020, a lot had piled up in life, when Slowly – which, unfortunately, I hadn’t used in almost two years, since I was swamped with everything – sent me a notification that a letter was on its way.
Strangely, during this period, it seemed that only Hungarians were finding me, with whom I kept in touch for varying lengths of time, but at some point, the story always came to an end.
But then, in February 2021, the beginning of my never-ending story arrived (or rather, began).
When you’ve sent and received quite a few letters, you might not feel that typical excitement with every new one because you know what to expect. But this letter was different. I couldn’t say why: it was a simple, kindly written introduction that could have turned into casual chatting. Yet somehow, reading just the first paragraph gave me completely different feelings than any other before, and I already felt that this was the beginning of something truly special.
One message followed another, and with each new line, we grew closer, even though we only shared our week’s events, our school and university experiences, and other absolutely ordinary happenings, written in increasingly longer letters each time.
A few weeks of writing on Slowly had passed when we found each other on another social media platform, but we didn’t switch right away – like a true gentleman, he wanted to wait until I had finished all my exams so that our constant chatting wouldn’t distract me from my duties. 🙂 But even then, we didn’t have to wait long for our weekly communication to turn into daily, or even all-day, messaging.
As fate would have it, we live relatively close to each other, so we could have our first meeting soon, which was quickly followed by a second, a third… And thanks to it all, our relationship slowly evolved from an online spark into true love.
It’s been over a year since he found me through Slowly, and we’re already approaching our first relationship anniversary.
We’ve had a wonderful, exciting, and eventful summer, during which we began exploring the country together; over the past nine months, we’ve celebrated university acceptance, birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s, and a graduation together; we’ve crossed some small and big milestones, and we’re eagerly awaiting the ones still ahead of us. We’ve never run out of things to talk about (even though a whole book series could be made from the many written messages we’ve exchanged), and thanks to our meetings, we can now surprise each other with tangible letters as well.
It’s funny how unpredictable life is: you always find your soulmate when and where you least expect it…
We still love reminiscing about the “first moments” of our fairytale-like meeting, and we’re grateful to fate (and the Slowly algorithm :D) for bringing us together: “Conrad12” and I. ♥
