The connection was laggard.

I unwrapped my warm bearclaw and pried the plastic top from my cup of coffee, praying the mean librarian wouldn’t see me with my contraband.

First I checked my email.  I had several messages from my Live Journal friends so I spent the next hour reading the new mail and responding.

Years ago I’d have done myself in for even considering making online friends.  I thought it to be the telltale sign of a lonely pathetic existence.  But I embraced it now as my only channel for meaningful interaction with real human beings.

Because I was in hiding I was forced to keep a distance from my neighbors.  No matter how well I liked someone in the village, if I were to form a bond of any sort I’d be jeopardizing my freedom.  So in the five years I’d resided in Haines Junction, no one had ever been invited to my cabin for dinner and I’d never accepted an invitation to anyone else’s home.  I would’ve loved to have spent Christmas or Thanksgiving with some of the interesting people I’d met while living here but it was too risky.  Loneliness was the price of my freedom.

But to my Live Journal community I could bare my heart—albeit cryptically—and they could lay open their souls before me.  Their companionship brought me tremendous comfort.  I was no longer ashamed of myself and it disheartened me that I ever was.

When I’d sent my last email of the day, I glanced through the window at my back.  Though I couldn’t distinguish them from the buildings across the street, the haze of snowflakes was apparent against the distant backdrop of evergreens.

I smiled.

The first snowfall of the season still excited that southern boy in me who’d spent most of his winters in North Carolina where snowstorms are a rarity.

Before leaving I visited the webpage of a local news station in Charlotte, North Carolina.  I browsed the website each time I came to this computer lab.  It was my only method of checking in on Elizabeth, John David, and Jenna Lancing, the family I’d deprived of a husband and father.

Even if something were to happen to them I’d probably never know or have the chance to prevent it.  But it eased my mind to peruse the news of Charlotte and its suburbs, if only for the symbolic gesture of me watching after my best friend’s wife and children.

Once I’d seen that the headlines didn’t reference the Lancings (and they never did) I entered Beth and Jenna and John David’s name into a search engine.  Nothing came up.  The only successful search I ever conducted concerned Jenna who had turned thirteen in August.

Last winter she’d won the hundred meter freestyle in a middle school swim meet and I stumbled upon the results which had been posted on her school’s webpage.  I’d been tempted to send her a congratulatory card.  The Lancings still lived in the same house on Lake Norman.  But for all I knew, Beth believed that I’d murdered her husband.  So I’d settled for merely printing out the swim meet results and highlighting Jenna’s name.