He used to be my teacher.

When I was seventeen, I asked a friend of a friend of my best friend to give me lessons in Italian. I'd always wanted to learn and when I met the guy and found out that he taught Italian professionally, I figured it must be fate.

I convinced him to come to my house every Sunday and promised to pay in return. We started out as barely acquaintances but ended up friends. He actually became one of my favorite people to spend time with. As it happens with people who leave the country and live elsewhere, we lost touch completely. I thought about him over the years and even asked around but I couldn't get a straight answer and life interfered.

Until last week.

As I'm going through my emails, I hit d to delete a series of twenty spam messages. Something makes me go back and open this one email with an Italian subject. In the last three years that karenika has been around, a few people have sent me emails in Italian so I figure maybe the email isn't spam. And, indeed, it isn't.

It's my teacher from eleven years ago. It's my friend. It turns out he went to the same school as my mother and they run into each other at a reunion and my mom recognizes him and walks up to him to ask him if he knew someone named Karen.

Small world, eh?

So he writes me an email and I am ecstatic. Since I am lazy and have a hundred unanswered emails, I take two days to write back and then anxiously wait for his reply. It doesn't come for about two days and the whole time I'm thinking that maybe I was too overbearing. Maybe I expressed too much excitement over finding my old friend. Maybe he read something in my site and thinks I'm insane. Maybe I said something that he interpreted as rude. Maybe he changed his mind about reacquainting.

Today, I finally get an email from him and his first sentence is, "And you replied. I was worried you'd say, where the fuck did this guy come from?"

I smile. I giggle. I laugh.

Paranoia must live in all of us.