A modern modern kind of love

You and I.
After that first fateful encounter and the magic of those first few months in the idyllic backdrop of the Mediterranean, our love, which had been in the purest style of the true romantics, nearly-impossible, but once it had happened, inevitable, and so striking that I could hardly think straight.
I called home pretexting something or other, requesting my Mum to exchange my return date with the airline. They were all rather unlikely, my reasons to stay longer in Europe...or at least those I was ready to share with them at the time. My parents thought it rather strange that I didn't even seem to mind missing the start of term at the University.

That gave us two extra weeks...
But it was inevitable...I had to go back.
Hadn't I?
My friends could hardly believed I had returned:
-You should have stayed, for ever...

It hadn't occurred to me...despite the fact that I cried my heart out when I left you...and during the flight, and at night back home. I knew you would come for me...never doubted it -not then, at least.

And then we entered the realm of the modern modern kinda love. I pestered my poor father to install an Internet connection. The next day wasn't fast enough...

Where a plane had been essential, now we had to make do with phone and chat-rooms on-line...No Skype yet...we're talking 9 years ago, after all...

The world wasn't modern enough for us, or at least the communication systems.
I recall the first phone-call I did...I hadn't yet told my parents I had met you, I bought an international phone-card for 100 Mexican pesos (a lot of money in my student days) and went to a phone-box nearby.
How exotic it might have been for you...as we started speaking, a band formed by a small family of indigenous people parade past me, playing cheerful (and tuneless songs) with their makeshift instruments.
The card lasted us 6 minutes...but every centavo I paid had been worth it.

The seven-hour difference made it difficult...I would turn my computer on as early as 7 in the morning (nothing any of my class assignments or teachers ever achieved) just to check my inbox...and read and re-read your emails...(I wish I had them still...in my lack of knowledge about how emails accounts worked I never managed to salvage them somewhere, but I still remember the best amongst them).

A tide of transatlantic flights ensued. We came and went, came and went...
And Love grew and shrank...grew and shrank...
grew and grew, and grew...

The rest...is modern history. The story of a modern-modern kind of love.