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A woman we'll call June carefully considered rekindling with a long lost love in 2001. Thirty-four years before, she said goodbye to Gary on an exit ramp off California's Highway 5, where he dropped her off after a night spent together rekindling the romance they had left behind when he had left for the Air Force and later, Vietnam. He had returned but was still in the Air Force, and she was a "flower-child" about to establish legal residency in Canada—they did not pursue a relationship at that time.

In the ensuing years June got married and had a child, and moved to England. But she never completely forgot Gary. In 2001, her marriage ended and she went through a period of great upheaval as she planned to move back to the U.S. While chatting with a co-worker about her childhood memories of the States, she described Gary, the boy she once loved. Later that day, her curiosity aroused by the conversation, she poked around on classmates.com. She had to enter personal information, including her email address, but stopped short of completing the process when she was prompted for payment. "It scared me. I thought 'What am I doing?' and I shut the computer down."

Mere hours later—and thousands of miles away—Gary commenced his last-ditch effort to try to find June. Plagued by dreams of her and the idea they could have conceived a child together during their night together in California decades ago, he had been looking for her for years. He told himself this was his last try and then it would be time to forget her and move on. He went to classmates.com, plugged in her high school, graduation date, and name. Voilà—there was her email address.

"For the next six months, we wrote emails to each other almost daily," says Jane. "Slowly, slowly we opened up. We hoped there might be a chance to rekindle in person what was happening extremely well in cyberspace, but both realized that it could all become starkly apparent when we physically met, that this was just a fanciful dream."

The meeting would prove otherwise. The dream became reality, and they've been married six years. "He knows the real me," Jane explains, "the person I was before life piled on layers of living." Recently Jane found a pocket photo of her sister in high school, with her sister's scrawl on the back: "Don't forget to marry Gary." She hadn't. And if you ask her, it was meant to be.

All Well That End's Well?
Of course, seeking reconnection with someone from the past isn't always welcome by the other part, and doesn't always end so well. But you needn't crash and burn to find the closure you seek. April from Boston says, "I found my first girlfriend on the Internet, started emailing her then calling her, and realized she's still an a*****e!" At least now she won't have to wonder.