College. Oh college. Texas A&M, 1992-1995. This was where I truly found my people and my place. My people! From freshman year, meeting Mary Matella and Julie Polzer and Jana Sneller Bermudez (all within days of arriving at campus!), I felt immersed in the life of the mind, a life filled with laughter, a life filled with adventure and change and opportunity.

Part of this blossoming was after sophomore year, when I applied to work as an opinion columnist at The Battalion, the school’s daily newspaper. I didn’t get the job as a columnist, but they hired me as front-desk receptionist. In my first week they offered me a guest column, then allowed me to write one all summer, then I was hired. During this time, I met two people who would change my life. Erin Janell Hill, another columnist, is one of the truest, bluest, best, kindest, funniest, most ridiculous and tender and amazing person I’ve ever known. There will be more than one story about Erin during this year, but I’m going to start with the discovery of EMAIL and all of its glories.

Erin consulting with our editor, Sterling Hayman, in the Battalion newsroom.

With my truest friends, there is always a courtship period, much like falling in love. That time when you first recognize a like mind, and can’t get enough of it. For Erin and me, that fall of 1994 was an immersion in a friendship like no other. We can each talk more than almost anyone else can stand, and yet, constantly interrupting each other, I genuinely feel like I never hear enough from her (and even more wonderfully, believe she feels the same way about me). Those two years left when we were both at school, it sometimes seemed that something didn’t really happen to me until Erin knew about it.

Which led us to one night, in the grimy, ink-soaked basement room of The Battalion. At the time, Lyle Lovett, a former Battalion reporter, was married to Julia Roberts, so I was digging through the morgue (the history of all stories at The Battalion) trying to find his clippings. I could hear Erin’s laugher coming down the hall, so I ran out to meet her — gleefully.

As we walked into the room, chattering over each other, I urgently asked her if she had read my latest email. At the time, this meant a black screen computer, filled with type in green or orange letters (depending on the monitor) with no italics, bold or … emoticons (can you imagine a LIFE BEFORE EMOTICONS?). Yes, that’s right, we put things in all caps a lot.

Anyway, Erin and I were frequent and fervent email users — what I wouldn’t give to have that correspondence at hand now. All of those letters filled with the huge questions we considered and daily minutia we experienced since we had last seen each other. And we went to the ’email computer’ set in the back room — right next to the morgue — and she sat down to read my email. As she read it, she’d say responses out loud, and I, still fruitlessly digging through the files for Lyle Lovett’s articles, would laugh and respond. The feeling of warmth and love in that room was a moment I would pin and put in my heart every day if I could.

That ability to constantly connect with Erin back at the beginning of email seemed like the very best hope for what the Internet could bring: Developing friendships, nurturing friendships, empowering friendships. Erin still lives in Bryan, Texas, and we see each other as often as we can. Months go by between even a ‘like’ on Facebook, and yet the friendship we nurtured in those black-and-orange emails in 1994 still makes me glow with love. Knowing and loving Erin helped me see what wondrous possibilities life holds, and introduced me to one of the best people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing.

I haven’t stopped smiling since I started typing this email. Oh, the joy of that yesterday.