Just got an e-mail from a college friend.

We were good friends. I suppose we are, but she's in Chicago and I'm in New Jersey. We worked on the newspaper together; she was two years behind me, and in our two overlapping years, we had some fun.

I had a crush on her. She had a boyfriend.

But aside from that, we were good friends -- we both knew that. That much we agreed on, even after I revealed my feelings (post-boyfriend) and she informed me she "never thought of [me] in that way."

I hadn't heard from her in months. Literally. In fact, I don't think I'd heard from her since I was in Chicago for a wedding in July and we got together for dinner. (There's probably a diary entry about it.) So I get an e-mail from her, with the subject "Catching up," thinking maybe she was writing to fill me in on recent happenings.

It was a mass e-mail.

I don't generally have a problem with those, since I often use the method myself when trying to communicate with a group of people a wealth of information or whatnot. But I think it was that this one ended with a list of personals -- one-line messages to various people who received the e-mail -- and I was not included that got me. It bothered me a little. She also mentioned that she recently was in Boston and New Haven -- close enough for me to have shot up for dinner or something to say hi (which is not beyond me, especially when good friends from far away are within half a day's drive). But I never heard from her. Granted, she may have been there for business or some personal reasons, and she may have only been there a day or two. But I used to think I might be informed of such journeys, being relatively close.

I wrote back and sarcastically told her I was hurt about not getting a call (at least an e-mail), saying, "Midwesterners just don't realize how close places are on the East Coast." Or something to that effect. (Midwesterners don't understand East Coast distances, that is a fact. I've had several funny encounters to both extremes, but I don't want to get into them now.)

And of course I write about this because I was sure I thought of her as nothing but a friend, but seeing her name in my inbox and expecting something a little more personal, but not getting it, I guess I still wish I had that crush. That is, with the hope she might feel the same way.

I guess I still like her.

Here's the story:

As I said, she and I worked at the newspaper for two years together (she starting as a freshman when I was a junior). We were good friends, and I grew to like her more than that. But she had a boyfriend, almost from the time I met her, so I kept all that other stuff to myself (I'm very respectful of that, having been burned once -- but that's another story). So I graduated, drove across country that summer, and stopped to see her at her (parents') place when I went through Chicago. It was so painful to leave after that visit, I knew I was in love.

But I kept it to myself for almost another two years, and saw her on various trips back out to Notre Dame. After learning she'd broken up with her boyfriend, I wrote her a letter in January (actually, a letter which I'd started, finished, and rewritten at least twice in the course of two years) telling her how I felt, and she called me to thank me but to inform me she had never thought of me in that way. Which was fine. I figured if I didn't take the chance, I would've regretted it more than the pain of being shot down -- which I expected to an extent.

And so I got over it, I thought, and when we got together this summer, everything was cool.

But that all ended tonight with that e-mail.