Her teenage summer crush unexpectedly came back into her life. ‘I felt like I was reconnecting with my best friend’

Iga was 16, Vlad was 18. He was laughing with friends. Then pushed his long hair out of his eyes, met Iga’s eye, and smiled.

“I remember feeling very excited about him,” Iga tells CNN Travel today.

Iga first saw Vlad in the summer of 2005. She was on vacation from Poland, at a summer camp in Greece. Vlad visited Skotina every summer from his home in what is now North Macedonia. The beach, in the foothills of Mount Olympus, was a home away from home for Vlad and he was always surrounded by a gang of friends.

While Iga was intrigued by Vlad, she was “also kind of reserved.” For the first few days, they circled each other, but didn’t talk.

Then, one evening Iga was sitting on the beach in a circle with her camp friends, while Vlad was sitting close by, in a separate circle, with his group.

“At some point we all started sitting together,” recalls Iga. “Then Vlad came up to me so he could talk to me, and we sat next to each other on the beach, chatting, having a conversation. And it went from there.”

Vlad noticed Iga right away, too. He had “so many good memories” of summers relaxing at Skotina beach. He knew all the regulars, and Iga stood out. He remembers the way she walked down the beach, recalls noticing her immediately, wanting to talk to her.

Once they did speak, Iga and Vlad quickly became inseparable.

“Every day we spent time together,” Iga recalls. “On the beach, or going hiking, chatting…”

The two communicated in English – a little tricky as Iga wasn’t as confident in the language as Vlad.

“But Vlad was helping me with certain words so we could communicate better,” says Iga.

Iga and Vlad spent the next two weeks in each other’s company. Looking back, Iga’s overwhelming memory of their time together was “feeling very safe.” She found Vlad to be kind, respectful, funny. She wasn’t exactly in love – they were technically just friends – but she had a pretty heady crush.

Vlad felt the same way. He describes their connection as “a friendship, but also a willingness to be together.” He felt like they were drawn to each other.

But both Vlad and Iga were realistic that this connection might not last.

“We had a really great time,” says Iga. “But I was still in high school. We lived very different lives in terms of being in different countries. There was no way for us to have a future. So that’s also what I remember feeling – feeling like it was exciting, but also knowing there was an end to it.”

This end rolled around all too quickly. Iga and Vlad said their goodbyes when the camp came to an end. Social media was still in its early days in 2005, but the two exchanged email addresses.

Back home in Poland, Iga classified Vlad in her head as “just a friend.”

“But even my mom remembers how excited I was when I got his first email,” says Iga. “We kept that conversation going for the next two years.”

Over that period, Iga and Vlad wrote back and forth about their thoughts on family, friends, travel, their studies, their hopes and dreams.

“Both of us were having our own lives, but we just felt connected,” says Iga. “We exchanged probably over 100 emails.”

“I couldn’t wait to receive an email from her,” says Vlad. “They meant a lot to me.”

The two found other ways to stay connected, including chatting via instant messenger.

“We’d download songs and listen to the album at the same time,” recalls Vlad. “Then we’d sit all night, talking about the songs for hours.”

In time, Vlad realized he was talking more to Iga than any of his other summer friends – really more than anyone in his day-to-day life.

Iga had a similar realization.

“We spent a lot of time chatting and writing emails. We sent each other pictures of what’s going on in our lives,” recalls Iga, who found herself often looking back at photos they’d taken together that summer, posing together.

Occasionally, Iga and Vlad would float the idea of meeting up again, but no concrete plans ever materialized.

And in time both Iga and Vlad entered relationships with other people.

“After that, I felt like, ‘I cannot really meet up with you, because I have a boyfriend,’” recalls Iga. “It felt like a great friendship, and I really wanted to meet him again – but I felt stuck in that I couldn’t do it, really.”

As their respective romances got more serious, the emails gradually died off.

“At some point, we just stopped having contact,” says Iga.

But Vlad never deleted his emails from Iga. He often thought of her fondly.

Meanwhile, Iga always felt grateful for her friendship with Vlad, and sad that it had dwindled.

When Facebook became omnipresent, the two connected there. They communicated sporadically – one time when they realized they just missed each other in Germany, another time Vlad posted a throwback photo to the summer in Greece – but it was intermittent and surface level.

“Losing touch was natural,” Vlad reflects today. “It comes with the distance.”

10 years later

Time moved on. Iga went to college, graduated and relocated from Poland to Germany. She got married, and then divorced within a year. It was a tough period.

Meanwhile Vlad’s work took him to the US, and he moved there permanently in 2015. Vlad saw the move as a new start following a recent break-up.

“I promised myself, when I go to the US, I won’t get into a relationship for at least a year,” he recalls.

Vlad had only been living and working in Chicago for a month or so, when, out of the blue, a message popped up on his phone. It was from Iga.

She was transiting through the Republic of Macedonia (which changed its name to North Macedonia after a 2019 referendum) and had a layover in the airport, not far from Vlad’s hometown. She’d dropped him a message, on the off chance he might be around and interested in a catchup, 10 years on.

But Vlad was on the other side of the world, in the US. When he saw Iga’s message he went from excitement to disappointment in the space of a few minutes, surprising himself by how sad he felt to miss Iga.

Vlad’s reply – explaining he’d moved to the US, saying how he wished he could have seen Iga – started a back and forth between the old friends on Facebook messenger.

The messages – just like their teenage emails – went deep quickly. Iga and Vlad started talking every day, catching each other up on their lives, filling in the blanks over the past decade.

“It got really intense quickly,” says Iga. “I felt like I was reconnecting with my best friend, with someone very dear to me.”

“It was so nice and refreshing to talk to Iga,” says Vlad.

Iga talked about her divorce, and Vlad mentioned he was also single. They felt connected to each other – just like they had when they were young, although neither necessarily assumed their connection had romantic potential.

But when, in early 2016, Vlad mentioned he was planning a trip back to Europe, to visit family, the idea he might stop by to see Iga in Germany almost went without saying.

“The day that he was coming to see me, it was very, very, very exciting,” says Iga. “I remember making banana pancakes for him. I woke up at five. I wanted to make him breakfast because he traveled overnight.”

Pancakes prepared, Iga drove to the airport to meet Vlad.

“The moment I saw him again was probably the best day of my life,” says Iga. “The emotion was really, really intense. It was even better than I imagined.”

Vlad recalls being overwhelmed by how surreal it was – and yet it also just felt right.

“She looked amazing,” he recalls. He knew what Iga looked like, he’d seen photos, but he realized he’d forgotten what it was actually like to be in her presence.

Plus, they’d both grown up. They were in their late 20s. They both were – and weren’t – the same people they’d been a decade before.

Iga showed Vlad around her city, Bielefeld, in northwest Germany.

“It was a lot of talking,” says Vlad. “We had a great time. You could see there was something going on. It was a short period of time to understand if we’re meant for each other, or if we want to build a relationship. But it felt good.”