In April I sent a message to a man I’ve still never met.

He’s a principal architect, thirty-plus years in, and I’d found something on his profile that I doubted anyone had mentioned to him ~ so I mentioned it. That was the entire message. No ask, no pitch, nothing to answer. I didn’t expect a reply, because those kinds of messages aren’t meant to get one.

He wrote back the next day. Warm, unhurried, and somewhere in the middle of it he offered to sit down sometime. His idea, not mine.

Then he gave me his email address and his cell phone number, neither of which I’d asked for.

I wrote back that it sounded like a wonderful idea, because it did.

Nobody named a day.

Five months went by.

I didn’t forget him. He was on a list, and the list came up, and every time it did I moved him down it. He had no IT problem that I could solve. His firm had an internal department and we had nothing to sell them for another three to six months at best. No future here. There was always something with a date on it.

He’d given me his cell phone number and I never dialed it. Not once in five months, and not on the day I finally wrote. I had the fastest channel available to me the entire time, and I never used it.

In September I sent him a second message, using the email he’d given me. I told him the five months were on me. Then I named two specific weeks and the days inside of them that worked on my end.

He replied that afternoon. He picked the date.

I sent an invite. He accepted it.

Under ninety minutes, start to finish.

The first thing he did was frame the meeting as something he’d offered, not something I’d finally chased.

I’ve been telling this story as “nobody named a day.”

I meant I didn’t.

And when I ask myself why, the answer I reach for first is that I was respecting the pace. That’s what you learn here, and I’d learned it. You don’t rush people. You let a relationship take the time it takes. On an island this size, pushing is the fastest way to close a door.

That answer is true enough to hide inside.

Here’s what was underneath it. He had no IT problem I could solve. His firm had an internal department, we had nothing to sell them for months, and there was no version of that conversation that ended in anything I could count. I didn’t move him down the list because I was being patient. I moved him down because he didn’t score.

I told myself it was patience. It mostly wasn’t.

The system was right about the deal value and wrong about the man’s. It scored his firm accurately and I’d score it the same way again. What the system has no field for is a man who will still be a principal architect in this town in five years, and it isn’t supposed to have one.

The score wasn’t the error. Letting it decide who was worth knowing was.

Because “no future here” turned out to be a fact about us, not about him.

I’m having pupus and drinks with him. I picked the time, he picked the place and made the reservation.

I still can’t tell you what it’s for. There’s no version of the next several months where I sell him anything, even if he wanted something. And if someone asked me tomorrow what the objective is, I’d have to say I’m not sure yet ~ which on the mainland would have meant there’d be no meeting.

I’ve stopped racing toward a finish line that doesn’t exist here. What I haven’t stopped doing is looking for it.