This Might Be the First Craigslist Ad to Win a Pulitzer

We may bemoan the loss of the real-life meet-cute, but today, the internet offers us hope: Through the troubled skies of Tinder swipes and breakups via emoji, the art of the heartrending, life-altering love letter still shines.

Picture it: Boston, 1972. It's New Year's Eve, and a Vietnam vet wanders through a deluge; tortured with thoughts of the lives he ended as a bombadier, he searches for a reason to live, hoping that the rainstorm “might wash away the patina of guilt that had coagulated around my heart.” Lo and behold, he meets a teary woman in a ball gown, who grabs his hand and whisks him to a lunch counter for coffee. They talk, they laugh, he goes to collect his thoughts in the restroom—and she disappears. But through her vitality, she convinces him that life is worth living. And now, he wants her to know how she affected him.

You see, in these intervening forty-two years I've lived a good life. I've loved a good woman. I've raised a good man. I've seen the world. And I've forgiven myself. And you were the source of all of it. You breathed your spirit into my lungs one rainy afternoon, and you can't possibly imagine my gratitude.

I have hard days, too. My wife passed four years ago. My son, the year after. I cry a lot. Sometimes from the loneliness, sometimes I don't know why. Sometimes I can still smell the smoke over Hanoi. And then, a few dozen times a year, I'll receive a gift. The sky will glower, and the clouds will hide the sun, and the rain will begin to fall. And I'll remember.

Read more in "I Met You in the Rain on the Last Day of 1972," a self-published masterpiece available only on... Craigslist. Yes, this bracingly eloquent tale, somehow the child of Nicholas Sparks and Tim O'Brien, is a Missed Connections gem. Anonymous M4W in Boston, GO FIND HER. And then turn your love story into the greatest Craigslist-self-published tragic romance of our time.