Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or the apartment, just the DVDs. There's no profit except writing practice being made here. Nor do I own the film You've Got Mail.
Reprendre Le Collier De Misère To return to drudgery, to the old routine.
Chandler slouched in his chair and stared out his window. He inhaled deeply. It was sunny outside and he'd spent the afternoon watching as fluffy white clouds rolled in over the city. He supposed they didn't have to be grey and weighted with rain, he was gloomy enough.
He'd watched the blue sky dim and the clouds reflect the sunlight to make a pretty pink and orange sunset, but he did not feel the passage of time. Nor did he recognise the beauty of the town he lived and worked in as the sunset cast the city in a golden glow. He really did have a brilliant view; grey city bustling with business and tourisms, the park verdant and lush in the distance, blue sky and cumulus clouds moving slowly as the world turned. He could see it happening, the rotation of the earth or the wind in the upper atmosphere, but he felt stuck. He was trapped in his office - he couldn't go home, he didn't want to work, all of his conversations would be construed and twisted with his new information. His heart and his stomach were tied into knots, his eyes unseeing, his mind racing.
Tears had prickled at the edges of his eyes and his neck was almost cramped with how tight he held his jaw and the miserable lump in his throat. His back was sore from the curve in his spine but Chandler couldn't bring himself to move.
Dorky. Annoying.
That was what Monica thought of him.
He'd turned his computer off about an hour ago. But the damage had been done. He'd memorised the email.
A disappointment.
Chandler could agree with some of the other adjectives she'd used to describe him. He was annoying and his jokes were endless. He could stomach those terms being attached to his name. They always were, for as long as he could remember.
The worst person.
He recognised enough of Monica's tone in her email that she was ashamed of how she'd asked him to leave in the restaurant and that it was her anticipation and resulting moodiness that made her act out.
But if she liked him in any sense of the term, she wouldn't have introduced him that way to a perfect stranger.
He made her miserable.
The bullet that penetrated his abdomen and lodged in his kidney, killing him slowly, poisoning him before he bled out, was the fact that Monica had picked the words that Chandler feared the most. She was his best friend, one of the only people who could stand him and easily the first on a list of people he thought he could admit his flaws to, and she had picked the worst facets of his personality to describe him to a virtual stranger. The things he worried about himself, the things he thought women wouldn't be able to look past but Monica somehow always had.
Or maybe she had just been pretending all those years.
Perhaps they all had.
Chandler rubbed his chin dejectedly, trying to figure out how to proceed. He couldn't decide if meeting with ChefGirl20 had been a mistake or not.
On one hand, he could never email that account again.
It was a shame because she'd become a good friend, not a confidant exactly but a reliable ear he could talk to if he ever felt the need. She was a friend outside of his regular circle, which wasn't something Chandler had many of. He worked long hours so he didn't have time to interact with many other people. Most of his friends were from his office. The ones he had made outside that environment were his neighbours and had been in his life for years. They were brilliant, all of them, but both groups knew each other, or knew of each other, and he, therefore, had to be careful about what he said about them.
For a minute, Chandler feared he'd given something away, but Monica hadn't seemed to realise what it meant when he walked in to the restaurant, so Chandler figured he was safe for a bit, and would have to, when he wasn't so emotional about the whole thing, go back through their correspondence with a fine tooth comb. Because if he had said something specifically and obviously about her or Joey or Ross, then he would have to come clean to Monica.
But if not, he could decide how he wanted to control the situation.
She had been a perfectly anonymous character to whom he could unload his worries and fears completely authentically or announce his conflicting emotions about his friends. Someone he could brag about his achievements at work to, which was something he couldn't do with his subordinates or his friends, who he could more easily portray his boredom in the workplace than his interest in it.
He'd asked for her opinion on whether he and his friends should tell Rachel that Ross had always had a crush on her, without their names of course. She'd mentioned she had a friend in a similar situation. She'd asked for his advice about a friend of hers who was in love with someone who already had a girlfriend. They'd discussed the morals of the situation at length.
Mistakenly, Chandler had thought this online acquaintance could be a voice of reason with a different perspective than the other people in his life. Someone with similar values but a different context and opinion. He'd laughed, in fact, they'd both joked on more than one occasion, at how similar their experiences were.
A cosmic coincidence.
Chandler exhaled hotly, jaw clenched.
A cosmic joke, more like.
She'd been spot on in her assessment of him. Chandler did like making people laugh. But he was getting tired of the universe laughing at him.
He'd fallen for ChefGirl20 somewhere along the way. She was sarcastic and surprising and intelligent. She kept him on his toes and the best part of his day was always tied with sitting in the coffee shop pressed against Monica's side and laughing at Ross, tied with getting an email from the internet stranger.
That was a brilliant joke.
Over the years he'd had a piddling crush on Monica at different times. Never strong enough for him to risk their friendship on, but insistent and tugging for attention nonetheless. He'd never been able to pinpoint why, except that she was naturally beautiful and enticingly stubborn, her need to keep things tidy more adorable than insufferable although he pretended otherwise. Sometimes. She was maddening and sarcastic and strange and Chandler sometimes felt himself getting caught up in his curiosity, but he'd always been able to restrain himself.
The only thing that surprised him now that he knew she was ChefGirl20 was that he'd fallen hard and fast for her. Without the threat of risking a friendship or ruining their quality of life by being awkward towards each other whenever they caught each other on the stairs or at one of Ross' university functions because they hadn't worked out, that crush had grown and flourished.
He couldn't allow that.
He couldn't keep emailing ChefGirl20 knowing his feelings were all muddled. He'd be leading Monica on.
But Chandler wasn't sure if he could behave normally around Monica knowing that on paper she was very probably the woman of his dreams. Now that he was aware of it, he wasn't certain he could return to normal. Someone would notice his odd behaviour. Most likely Monica herself. Or Joey, who'd be looking for an answer about how his meet-up went. Or Rachel and Phoebe who were the self-proclaimed queens of romance and auras respectively.
Shit. Joey.
Joey had caught him whistling in the shower, smiling at his computer screen. Chandler had tried to deny it in those early days, but pretty soon he'd been unable to contain the whole wonderful experience. It hadn't been enough to tell the girl receiving his emails that he appreciated her presence. He needed to tell his roommate that she was awesome.
Naturally, that discussion had led to weeks of gushing about the formless voice who emailed him regularly with no details of her personal life. He and ChefGirl20, which in itself was the stupidest, most obvious name Monica could have picked as her anonymous email and Chandler couldn't believe he hadn't put it together sooner, had sworn they'd stay away from personal facts. Respecting that and the way that rule made even the mundane stories read as personal, Chandler had not told Joey much about their communication.
Except that they were meeting.
Shit.
Someone was going to ask. Inevitably. One of the members of their group, sitting at dinner around Monica Geller's table, would ask where Chandler was. He was meant to be home from work now, after all, a normal work day had been his cover. And Joey, who had been so proud that he was taking this risk and meeting his pen pal, would give away the secret.
And why wouldn't he?
Joey had encouraged him to suggest the meeting.
Joey had tried to soothe Chandler's anxiety earlier that morning.
For all Joey knew, their lunch meeting had gone well and that was why Chandler was yet to return or call. That thought, the pride in Chandler, and hope that it went well, would result in Joey commenting, at the least, or spilling the whole thing, at the worst.
Chandler needed to stop that from happening.
Monica, by the tone and content of her email to a perfect stranger, didn't seem to have connected that the man she spoke to online under the proviso that she never reveal anything personal was the same as the one who she told her deepest darkest secrets to. But she would if Joey told her that Chandler went to meet with a mysterious woman he'd been emailing and was probably busy getting some or wimping out and just talking to her even though he'd been swooning for a month over the faceless girl.
Monica would surely put two and two together then.
Then she would remember the email she sent him, knowing that the man she wanted to meet was the man she was disappointed by and that her best friend was the one she told was a disappointment.
She could never find that out.
He had to call Joey. He couldn't reveal anything to him. Chandler wasn't even sure if he'd say anything at all, but he definitely couldn't mention that his online infatuation was their neighbour Monica over the phone. He'd have to be vague. He'd have to be honest. And he'd have to hope that Joey understood his urgent tone when he asked him to please not tell anyone and only claim that Chandler was held up at work.
Joey had a couple of questions when Chandler made that rushed phone call, but Chandler promised to answer them when he got home. His voice had cracked and warbled as he spoke, so Chandler figured his best bud got the message that he was fairly upset by the whole endeavour.
Chandler sat in his office and stared out the window once he hung up the phone, staring out into the city as the streetlights flickered on one after the other, illuminating the streets. He had no idea how he was going to treat this delicate situation, but his temples were aching and his mouth was dry. Those bigger questions were something best dealt with in the morning when he'd had some time to recover from the shock of his online friend being Monica Geller and Monica Geller's disappointment when he'd shown up at their designated meeting place.
For now, he just had to work up the courage to actually go home.