So, I work day to day Doordashing. It’s about as good as it sounds, my car is a piece of shit, I get yelled at by white people for being two minutes late delivering their taco cabeza. They don’t know non tippers get full blast AC and maybe a bite off the end if I’m feeling generous. See, I used to work at Amazon, but I pulled something real bad when I was lifting boxes. Left me with a bad back and 6 months of medical leave, after which I was let go. I’m good enough to drive round people’s lunches but not good enough to caddy their furniture, I guess? Oh well. What can you do? Can’t blame the company, can you? When you’re no longer of use, you have no more place in this world. I’m making the most of it, though. Hey, you remember how we met? On that silly little server, posting about fucking Neopets. That’s the most embarassing thing about it to be honest, what stops me from telling folks about our whole little affair. Who wants to admit they were groomed over Neopets? Well, I’d like to say I got over it, but here I am, right? I gotta be honest, it’s nice having you as a captive audience for once. This has been a long time coming. You might think it strange that I waited so long to find you. Here’s the thing— for a long time, I convinced myself I was over it. It was hard, but I eventually got past it… I eventually forgot you. Well, that’s a lie. I shoved you to the back of my mind by frontloading it with all the other things. School. Commissions. Community work. You never stop hustling when you start young. That doesn’t mean you’re good at hustling, mind you, just that you’re never able to sit still or you start to eat yourself. I don’t sleep and my bones feel like shit all the time. It’s not your fault. But also, what you did didn’t help. That’s kind of what it boils down to. It turns out when you’re responsible for a big, unaddressed trauma, you become a really good scapegoat for everything else. The boomers were right about online relationships— they pale in comparison to the real thing, don’t they? Not that online ones have any less impact on the psyche, or that real life ones are any less surface level and superficial— but online, you’re a ghost. If you hurt me a country mile away and I only know you by your username, I can’t just come over and find you. It’s a good thing you sent over your address when I was 15 so we could send each other gifts. I still have that mug, you know? The one shaped like Togepi? I don’t know why I didn’t throw it out. I thought about it lots of times. Shattering the thing to the floor into a million pieces. But I never did. It was too much trouble to go and break something that still held use to me. It was the perfect size for my coffee, so I kept using it. I still do. It’s stuff like that which keeps a presence in your life long after a person is gone. I suppose it’s my fault for not trying harder to get rid of those things, but I don’t know. I’m sure that the harder I scrubbed, the more I would have found. We played so many video games together. You introduced me to so many songs. When my cat died, you were there to comfort me through it. How do I divest myself from those things? Doesn’t that just make a hole in my life shaped exactly like you? I don’t know. There aren’t really a lot of good options you left me.
Why now, you’re asking, maybe? That’s a good question. This was all sort of impulsive. I’m not sure any of it is real— it doesn’t feel real, I’m sure least of all to you. Why indeed… I suppose it’s because every venture I wished to achieve in life has failed, and this seemed like the next viable option. I always told myself I would never kill myself, mostly because I resented the suicidality of my adult friends. I had such a superiority complex over it, haha. I despised the self-indulgent weakness, the vying cries for attention. The piteous mutilation, the false calls I nonetheless would have to wait at their beck and call for. But in a way, this is suicide— I’m sacrificing my chance at a good life, even a mediocre one, to destroy you utterly. I’m still weighing the pros and cons. I still don’t actually want to die. But what are my prospects for life, anyway? World’s in flames. Country’s melting down. I’m alienated from most people my age. I have some online “friends”, but, ahh. They don’t really live up to our sordid codependency. The thing about the sort of friendship we had is that there are parts you just can’t get in a normal, healthy acquaintanceship. The multi-hour late night calls, well into the morning… responding to every text message within seconds the moment you were awake… the feeling like it was us two against the whole world, the isolation yet rush it fed our hearts. I’ll be honest, I know I’m second priority in everyone else’s lives. That’s just the way it is. People who aren’t internet-stunted like me have folks in real life that matter more to them. It’s natural after all— if I had even one friend who lived near me, that I could consistently get to spend time with me, who I knew I could really depend on if I really needed it…
Ha, well, I guess the important fact is I don’t.
You’re afraid of the ocean still, I hope. Maybe you got over it in the time since we last spoke. Hopefully the exenuating circumstances still spark some fear into you. It’s actually a whole drop. We’re over a cliff right now in my shitty Toyota Corolla and the front half you’re wedged in is teetering over the side. It would take one push— one good tap of the pedal— to send us careening down into the rocky waters below. I actually confuse my brakes and my acceleration all the time. Sometimes when I’m parked I accidentally rev the engine and think about what would’ve happened if I was still in drift. They would never have let me on the road if they knew, but they did not know.
I’m curious about the life you led after we cut off all contact, but at the same time, I don’t want to know. There’s no good option. What if you led a better life after you left? What if it was worse? The fact that you aren’t dead already is kind of a relief, but… I don’t know, you tried to kill yourself over a lot of other things and maybe it’s insulting if you didn’t try over this. Maybe you went and got therapy and actually told them what you did (I doubt it). You probably went on and made friends with other, hopefully more age appropriate people— were you able to keep that up? How does one make connections with others after doing something unforgivable? Maybe it wasn’t unforgivable to you. And hey— maybe it wasn’t. People have such a specific idea of grooming. I did at the time. All the URLs I had on blocklists and would send you to block too, they were shitty creeps, abusive boogeymen, odious motherfuckers sliming their way into DMs with full knowledge of what they were doing to lamblike, innocent children… but I wasn’t a lamblike, innocent child, and you weren’t knowledgable of what you were doing at all. I don’t believe in any malice behind your actions. You are maybe the world’s first accidental child predator. But I don’t know. I give you a lot of leeway, even now. My biggest regret of the whole affair is not asking, at the time, why— what did you think you were doing? That’s the greatest mystery. Now I can’t ask you anymore. All my memories are jumbled up, I can’t place the events at the right times, 14-17 blur between each other as if it were one giant hazy year. And you, you’ve had all the time in the world to formulate a response, an excuse. I lost my chance for 17-year-old me to castigate you as they deserved. I meekly let it go as one last olive branch to my oldest, closest friend. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have acted decisively and mercilessly— to save both of us so much suffering in the ensuing years. Such a painful black mark on our psyches, yet at the same time, so muddied.
Our whole relationship was a game of chicken. I never gave my age because I was never asked. You never clarified my age before those roleplays. Nor did you ask if I was ok with escalating them either. We performed a mutual dance of avoidance. If we never established boundaries, we had no boundaries to violate. The elephant was not in the room, nothing in the equilibrium had to change. So we danced and danced, till ironically the day I turned 18. That was the point where we both could no longer look at our past actions in that comfortable ambiguity. Our crimes laid out under a harsh, unforgiving spotlight. In any case we both fled the scene.
The only question I’m left with now is, why couldn’t you have asked? Why couldn’t you have clarified? My omission was not intended as deception. Sure, I didn’t want to give my age out— ironically, because I thought that announcing it would put me in danger. What kind of kid wants to announce themselves as a kid at the grown-ups’ table? Why you never took action, even after I became an adult… I don’t know. You never said anything. For the longest time I thought I was losing my mind. It took being away from you, making mistakes in other relationships with other adults who were more responsible than you, to realize anything was wrong with our conduct. Why? Why was it me having to point out these things? Only after the fact, far too late, seeing things with any clarity. Now I can’t see anything at all.
No one understands. My parents don’t know a thing about this era of internet. They’d have no idea how to parse the idea of internet roleplay much less what happened. When I talk to a fellow person, their smiles and talk about whatever, I wonder what point of the friendship is appropriate to say this to them out loud. Hi, I got semi-groomed during Toon Town Discord RP. Hi, I don’t know how to see anything but masks on your face and mine. No one on earth can help me. It’s too absurd to consider. If someone told that to me I’d laugh. And I’d tell them they’re right, no one on earth can help them. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s weakness. I’m here to make the first real choice of my life, 26 years in. There are no good options. Maybe you took them away from me all those years ago, or maybe I did that to myself in the years after.
My foot’s on the pedal. What do you think?