DJ Louise Chen on a meeting at Luxembourg Bus Station

I was 13 and, um, my Dad had just brought back a laptop from Taiwan and showed me how to connect it to the internet. But once I was on the internet in this vast ocean, I just was like, “okay, so what do I do with it now?” I remember going to school and one of my best friends in class, he was like, “Oh, you should come to the school chatroom. We have a chatroom on IRC.” So, I joined the school channel. I had no idea who they were. I just saw usernames. And then one of them started talking to me in private, like in our private one-on-one chat. His nickname was “Ex Inferis,” and I just remember thinking, “Okay, I don’t know who you are, and you have, like, a metal name. Great.” Somehow we would converse, like, every night after school After a few weeks, I wanna say, like, two months or something, I really started asking... I really started wondering who he was. And I guess from, like, our chatting, I’d figured kind of, like, oh, he’s in the French section, he’s four years older than me, he’s this, he’s that. I honestly cannot remember how we came to this conclusion. Somehow, we agreed to meet on December 31st, 1999. Everyone met up at the bus station in Luxembourg. The bus station, the central bus station, parked in front of the post office. It’s like this really beautiful building that’s still there, and it just had, like, hundreds of buses coming in and out all day long, all night long. And so Andre and I agreed to meet there, to have a net meeting, uh, at the post office that night. I was, like, madly in love with him of course. Like, secretly. I had used up all my magical thinking, you know? Um, and I had, like, built him up to be this, like, perfect, godly man. And, um, I mean, then we became friends. I think I was... I became friends with, like, some of the older kids who were in his classroom and then we became kind of friends. And eventually, when I was 16, we did go out for a little bit. And, you know, it failed as 16-year-old romances often do. Um, but we stayed in touch. And for the last 21 years, 22? We’ve been wishing each other our birthdays respectively, and writing to each other every year for our birthdays. You know, not knowing where we are, what we’re doing, but always writing to each other. And then 2020, over Christmas, we met up again. So, 20 years later, 20 years after the first time we met at the post office, we met up again. For me, it was like, um, it was like a closing a loop, closing a chapter, but it was very comforting because it kind of made me realize that I’m still the same person. Part of me was already me in 1999, and as much as I’ve, like, lived I’ve obviously lived and done so much more, there’s something very comforting in feeling like, oh, well, if I hadn’t, like, these guys that I hung out with when I was 15 are still the guys I hang out with at 30, 34, 33. We had really found our people back then. Like, we’d really found each other.