Love in the Time of Dial-Up

In the fall of 1999, when the world was still bracing for Y2K and everyone saved their documents on floppy disks, love bloomed slowly—pixel by pixel, word by word, across the shaky lines of dial-up internet. Back then, the web was not yet a stream but a sputter. Connections were noisy, unreliable, and precious. It was in this static-laced symphony that Adam met Eliza.

Adam was 17, a high school senior in a small town in Ohio. His world was a blur of algebra textbooks, CD players, and scribbled mix-tapes. Every evening, after dinner and homework, he'd retreat into the glowing blue cave of his family's boxy IBM desktop, waiting through the tortured squeals of the dial-up modem. Only one phone line meant arguments with his sister were frequent and fierce, but for Adam, it was worth it.

Eliza was from Vancouver. She’d joined a text-based roleplaying forum where users adopted fictional personas, wrote elaborate stories, and messaged each other in AOL chatrooms. Adam’s screen name was “ByteKnight17,” a not-so-subtle nod to his love of computers and fantasy novels. Eliza, ever the poetic soul, was “FleurOnFire.” She played a rebellious princess in their fantasy campaign; Adam played a rogue knight with a tortured past.

What started as collaborative storytelling gradually bled into late-night conversations. They sent each other awkward jokes, snippets of poems, and scanned doodles of dragons and castles. Eliza had a thing for typing in lowercase, refusing to capitalize anything, even her own name.

"i think i would’ve liked to live in the 1800s," she wrote once,

"but only if i could take a flashlight with me."

Adam saved that message in a Notepad file and read it again and again.

In those days, relationships weren’t measured in selfies or stories, but in the time you dared to spend online, knowing a parent might pick up the phone and disconnect you without warning. There was no FaceTime—just patience. No typing indicators—just hope that they were still there on the other side of the screen.

They never spoke on the phone. Eliza didn’t like her voice, and Adam didn’t want to push. Instead, they exchanged emails that read like letters. Sometimes she’d attach a photograph—grainy, low-res—but to Adam, she looked like the kind of girl songs were written about. Wind-blown hair, dark eyes, and a smile that always seemed a second away from laughter.

One night, in mid-December, Eliza wrote:

"do you think we’d still like each other if we met in real life?"

Adam stared at the blinking cursor for almost an hour before replying.

"i don’t know. maybe we’d be shy. maybe we wouldn’t know what to say without a keyboard. but i think… yes."

By January, their storylines in the forum had dried up. They no longer needed fantasy to bridge the distance—they had grown into something real. A quiet intimacy formed, not rushed by urgency or public display. There were no digital footprints, no screenshots—just fragments of messages stored in email folders and printed out to hide under pillows.

Then one night, Eliza stopped replying.

Adam refreshed his inbox hourly. Days passed. Then weeks. He wrote three long emails, each more desperate than the last. Finally, in early February, he received a message—not from Eliza, but from her older sister.

The subject line read: "I’m sorry."

Eliza had been in a car accident on her way back from a bookstore. Her injuries were severe, and she hadn’t made it through the night.

Adam didn’t cry at first. He just sat there, the CRT screen humming quietly, the room cold and too bright. Then he clicked open the last email Eliza had sent him.

"i think we’d sit by a river someday. maybe not say much. just watch the sky do its thing. that’d be enough, right?"

He printed it and folded it into his journal. And for a long time, he didn’t go online at night. The dial-up noise became something hollow—just sound without promise.

Years passed. The internet evolved. AOL faded. Broadband replaced dial-up. Phones became smart. People fell in love with emojis, selfies, and swipe-rights. Adam graduated, moved to the city, became a software engineer, and buried that part of his heart where nostalgia nests.

But one summer, over a decade later, while cleaning out his childhood home, Adam found a shoebox filled with old printouts—emails, roleplay snippets, Eliza’s poems, one faded photo of her smiling with a mug in her hand, slightly out of focus. And there, folded in a square, was her final message.

He sat on the floor and read every word again. Some were awkward. Some beautiful. All were real.

Later that night, Adam logged into the same forum, now barely used, half-broken and nostalgic like an old bookstore with dusty shelves. He clicked through the archives until he found their old story—"The Thorn Princess and the Broken Knight." He reread it in silence.

And for the first time in years, he replied:

“I still think about that river.”