tl;dr: Heartbreaking.

I went to high school in the least glamorous part of California, in a rural town with no shortage of dairy farms, meth labs and Pontiac GTOs sporting 20-inch rims. I was the only nerd for miles and miles, I thought, until I met Aaron Smith.

Aaron was 6'2", blue-eyed, well-read and willing to play Scrabble with me for six hours straight without a break. His cerebral traits alone would've made me putty in his hands, but I would soon discover that Aaron had scissorhands, useless for playing with putty.

Most days Aaron sat in the back of our French class, staring out a tiny window in the door. He didn't speak unless called on, and then he'd respond with some brilliant comment to show he wasn't missing any class discussion.

Aaron came and left the second the bell rang, so I never saw him up-close, not until the end of the quarter, when we sat next to each other for a midterm in the computer lab. I finished early and glanced at his screen: He was finished, too, and had a web browser open to Livejournal. Intrigued that someone else had an account on the site — and wasn't afraid, like I was, of using it in front of our peers — I committed his username to memory and looked it up when I got home.

His entries were long and lovely, full of eloquent thoughts on philosophy and literature and a bucket-list wish to live in Asia. I left a flattering comment identifying myself, and then I added the screen name in Aaron's profile to my AIM buddy list.

Before long we were chatting all the time, late into the night, and playing marathon Scrabble games online. I grew to value him as a person with whom I could talk about real things, like Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand and whether happiness was all an illusion (yes, my new friend said, and we can't be trusted to measure our own). In a place where it seemed nobody else knew what books were, I'd found my kindred spirit in Aaron.

Our online closeness never parlayed into a friendship at school, though. One of us would say hi when the other walked into the room, and sometimes we'd wave to each other in the halls, but I was too shy to talk to him at length in person, and French was our only period together. The rest of Aaron's day was spent in a portable classroom with the kid who had Down syndrome and a girl I knew from art class who was always writing letters to her father in prison. Aaron didn't show any signs of a broken home life or an intellectual disability — quite the opposite, actually — so I never thought to ask what the deal was with the separate class. I just assumed he was there for some behavioral issue. Maybe he did drugs.

Both of us skipped our senior year and left for college early, and thanks to late-starting schedules we were staying up chatting even later. I started hinting that we should meet up the next time we were both back home, like in real life, at my favorite hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. Several months had passed since graduation, and I missed the guy.

"No, I don't drink coffee," he typed.

"Me either, but this place has a really good drink with little candy-bar bits. It doesn't even taste like coffee."

"Why would you order coffee if it doesn't taste like coffee?"

"Or you could get tea or whatever," I wrote back. "It'd just be fun to hang out."

I had these scuffles with him every now and again. They didn't deter my pursuit. To put it crudely, I knew I was Aaron's only opportunity to get laid — intellectual teenage guys are still teenage guys, and in my experience driven by one thing — so I figured he must just be playing hard to get. Eventually I got him to commit to meeting me for tea.

It was a warm fall day, so I laid out my beat-up board on one of the patio tables on the wrap-around porch at Queen Bean. I was happy to see Aaron when he walked up, and even happier when his Scrabble skills proved just as polished in person. Neither of us said much after some initial catching up — plus some shit-talking on my part, which Aaron never reciprocated — but I was actually relieved that there wasn't any pressure to keep a constant conversation going. I'm always a bit suspicious of people who are excessively chatty. Plus, I had to pay close attention during our games, or my inevitable loss would be even more shameful.

At one point another regular at the cafe recognized me, and she came over to say hi and check out the game. Aaron apparently felt no need to be friendly to my other friend. He just sat there, solemnly staring, and offered only the slightest and awkwardest smile when I made introductions. My other friend would later ask who Aaron was, exactly, because he seemed, um, kinda weird.

But I was weird, too, in my own way. Isn't everyone? Aaron's awkwardness didn't faze me, and it didn't change the fact that he was hot, smart, had an excellent memory for little things I told him, and seemed entertained by the god-awful crazy shit I wrote in my Livejournal. He'd memorized the minutiae from my day-to-day life, and that meant more to me than his grace with strangers. It also meant he liked me, right? Maybe he was just uncomfortable at cafes.

"I'm feeling kinda stir-crazy, sitting here this long," I said after he'd beaten me at a second game. "What about you?"

"No," Aaron said. "I'm not stir-crazy."

We had half a dozen exchanges like this before I decided to lead the horse to water and directly assert what I'd been hinting: that we go back to his place. OK, he said. I followed him there in my own car and spent most of the drive second-guessing myself. Was I being too pushy?

The sun had set in the 10 minutes it took us to get there, and it was dark by the time we pulled up to the small duplex Aaron shared with his mother (another thing we had in common: I lived in close quarters with a single mom, too). Mrs. Smith was a mystery shopper, Aaron told me as he unlocked the door, and wouldn't be back for a while.

The living room was dark, with low ceilings and wall-to-wall bookshelves. A futon, covered in lint and too small for someone Aaron's height, was left open in the middle of the room. The frame dug into my pant legs when I sat down.

Aaron never took a seat, preferring instead to pace. These are my books, he told me, fingering their spines and pulling out a few, one at a time. Most were scifi novels, and he recounted their plots in painful detail. You'd like this one, he said. He said it about every book he showed me, indiscriminately, even though he knew I didn't care for the genre. This went on for a couple hours.

I waited and waited for something more to happen, but nothing ever did, not even when I got him, walked over to him, stood close and tried to will my friend out of his shell. I didn't just want to hook up; I would've taken emotional closeness, too, even the platonic kind that grows from discussing shared life experiences. I tried taking the lead again — what kind of music do you like? what do you want to do after college? — but Aaron would deflect my questions with one-word answers and go back to talking about the books. He didn't listen to music, he said. But this one, this book, it's really great, he said. When was he going to stop talking about the books? Even a bookseller at a bookshop would've at least asked what brought me into the store that day.

The more Aaron talked, the more I was broken down by self-doubt: I'm not this guy's intellectual equal, after all. I'm not pretty enough. I spend too much time online and now I've lost the art of interacting with live human beings. I left, crestfallen, when he was holding Of Men and Monsters in his hands and telling me about a society where the humans had turned into vermin living in the walls of monster's houses.

I'm an average-looking girl, maybe a little above-average but certainly not some goddess who can get any guy she wants. My night with Aaron wasn't a disaster because we didn't hook up — that would've been normal and OK. It was a disaster because I felt like I was hanging out alone. I would've preferred he reject me.

Trainwreck dates are often described as ones where the couple "had no chemistry," but a more accurate description is to say that they had bad chemistry. They aren't the same. With Aaron, there really was no chemistry. And that void, that unknowing — it's much harder to swallow than rejection.

A few days after we hung out, when we were back to chatting on AIM, I learned that our evening together had been of his more favorable social encounters.

He typed, "When you were at my house, did you want me to kiss you?"

Had I been 27, not 17, I would've explained to him — in plain language — that, yes, when a girl invites herself over, a girl who talks to you for hours online more nights than not, she wants you to kiss her. But I didn't say it. I backed my way out of the conversation and didn't talk to him again. Bitch move? Maybe. I have more empathy now. Back then I was in college, where well-read guys ran rampant. I didn't need the uphill battle.

A couple years ago, out of the blue, Aaron sent me this:

I hope this is still your e-mail address. You know, I've discovered that overall I don't really like writing all that much. It sometimes depresses me. So I guess we have less in common than I first thought when we talked back in high school. Yeah, in fact a lot has changed, but I still wanted to catch up.

I don't know what's happened when we've tried to talk before — I'm sure I did something wrong — but if you'd like to start corresponding again, I've just rediscovered e-mail.

I'm including a picture of Nami from One Piece, because she reminds me of you every time I see her.

Nami is a busty anime character with short orange hair. No resemblance, but the picture at least cleared up the mystery of whether Aaron found me attractive.

Since his address was now in my contacts list, he showed up as a suggested friend on Facebook. He has a master's in history now and lives in Japan, teaching English as an expat in a country where he doesn't speak the language.

I flicked through his photo albums, which look like what you get back when you develop the party-favor disposable cameras from a wedding that had an open bar — random shots of found objects, except without any shots of faces. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures spanning several years and not a single one contains another person. And the photos of Aaron, they're all self-portraits: his reflection in a car window, in a puddle on the sidewalk, in the mirror at a barbershop; his head in front of some Japanese tourist trap, his arm outstretched to fit everything in the frame. Where are his friends? Did he never get a girlfriend? Why was there never anyone around to take Aaron's picture?

I'm a journalist, and last year I interviewed a man with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) who has lost his ability to speak, swallow or move any body part but his eyes. He speaks through an optically controlled computer, blinking out a letter at a time, like Stephen Hawking does with his cheek. I never get scared of interviewing someone, but I was terrified of interviewing him.

Minutes after I arrived, though, the man's charm and humor had disarmed my nerves. Rather than wanting to leave, I wanted more time with him. The computer voice, the whooshing of the ventilator, the aide in the room, the delay before his replies — it all fades into the background and a warmth breaks through and you can feel who he is. It's no different than talking to anyone else.

Aaron has boundless advantages over a person in the late stages of ALS. He can change the volume and tone of his voice, laugh, crinkle his face, punctuate his sentences with hand gestures. He can tear across the room and give you a hug or a high-five or a slap on the ass. But you still can't feel who he is. Talking to him is worlds different from talking to anyone else. He's trapped in ice without a pick.

Despite what he said about losing interest in writing, Aaron still does it — hard habit to break — on a Wordpress blog that, bless his heart, shows up on the first page of search results for anyone who Googles his name. I spent a couple hours recently working my way back through the archives, just like I had 10 years ago when I found his Livejournal. He's still a good writer, gifted at churning out honest prose.

On his new blog, in between blunt descriptions of a new nephew (who "came out of [Aaron's] sister's insides") and a night at the bar (he still hasn't discovered his tolerance for alcohol), I found a painful nugget of truth, a revealing two sentences on his failed attempts at dating. I read it and realized that, if given the option of being paralyzed in midlife from ALS or reaching old age with an autism spectrum disorder, I'd have to think hard before picking. I don't know why I'm like this, my old friend wrote. It's like I'm deaf to a dog-whistle everyone else can hear.