Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 11:46:15 +0000
From: Secret Writer <secret_writer@outlook.com>
Subject: Blue Fury, and the boy that never was

*----- Blue Fury, and the boy that never was

Hi

This is, a you probably know, a story. Fiction, not reality, and so no,
it's not about you, whatever you might believe. Although, for one person,
that doesn't apply, because this is based on something very real.  As
usual, if you shouldn't be reading this for whatever reason, or you don't
like the idea of boys falling in love, then don't stay here and read
this.

For the benefit of anyone bothering to read this section, this isn't like
my other stories, it's kind of sad.

If you enjoy this story, or anything else on this site, please donate at
http://www.nifty.org/donate.html And finally, your feedback is always
welcome, you can contact me at secret_writer@outlook.com.
-----*

I'm feeling angry, so fucking angry.  As well as feeling sad,
disappointed, rejected, used, stupid, gullible, and generally devastated.
 But don't worry, it worked.  I mean, you were good at it.  So I'm also
still a tiny bit in love with you, which I also hate myself for.  It's
fair to say, I didn't expect things to end this way.  You know, with you
ripping my heart out and stamping all over it right in front of me like
that.  But then I hadn't wanted it to end at all. Not really.  I thought,
back then, that what we had was the beginning of something.  Something
awesome.

A chance meeting, in a relatively random corner of the internet.  I guess
both of us were hiding, for various reasons, tentatively exploring
possibilities.  For you, as you later described, a cautious return to
relationships.  For me, I don't even quite know what it was, but it was
exciting to find you.  It was so easy to talk to you, sharing the same
stupid, sometimes childish, and sometimes very clever sense of humour.
 Chatting and laughing about the internet acquaintances we shared.
 Talking about all kinds of random stuff, with those occasional pieces of
our real selves, discreetly sprinkled in, slowly, revealing the parts of
ourselves that were more usually hidden, disguised, or just lied about.

I remember how quickly I started to miss you.  A day at school would feel
like an eternity.  Your weekly evening rugby practice was bordering on
hell for me, knowing that you both weren't going to be around for us to
chat for a couple of hours, and that you were playing that stupid violent
game.  God I worried about you so much.  And then, as we chatted more and
more, how things seemed so much better, closer, and real.  You were so
much more openly enthusiastic about 'us' than I could ever dare to be.
 Gently, but constantly pushing me for more.  An email address, a phone
number, something more than our increasingly frequent web chatting.

That was the first time that this was a difficult relationship for me to
be in.  My own experiences, and my mental health meant that I was feeling
terrified of letting anyone get actually close to me.  And that night,
typing away to you, disclosing just the smallest part of my own issues,
was up until then, probably the scariest thing I had ever done.  Telling
someone that you are bipolar is usually the surest way to get them to
abandon you, and I was desperate for that not to happen.  Desperate to
retain even just a little of what I knew I was feeling for you, but
struggling to tell you.  There was so much of me telling myself not to do
it, not to tell you, not to be honest.  But I knew, deep down, that if I
was going to have any hope at all of you becoming more than some random
boy I chatted to online for a few days, then I had to try and be honest.

You stayed, of course, because you were totally awesome.  That night, I
think I cried the most I had ever cried, but for the first time not
because I was sad.  I could never have admitted it at the time, but I was
in love with you, even then.  The couple of photos you sent me of you,
looking so adorable, were great, but not necessary, because I was in love
with you for the person you were, not what you looked like.  Although,
yeah, you were cute as hell too, which of course wasn't a bad thing.

So it seemed like a natural progression, an email address, a messaging
app.  And wow, how our relationship exploded.  A couple of hours a night
was now several hours a day, all day, on and off.  Both of us working
around school and family, for as long as I could stay at school that is.
 And even when things got so bad that I was just at home, you were there.
 Always there, with the right thing to say, bringing me those precious
moments of joy.

Remarkable for so many things, perhaps the most surprising was the
absence of sexual content.  Not that I wasn't thinking about it.  Oh how
I was thinking about it.  Physical distance was just one of the many
barriers to there being a sexual strand to what was becoming a proper,
real, multi-faceted relationship.  And wow, how that changed.  I don't
remember how, or why, but that night, as our conversation slowly turned a
corner.  By then, actual conversation.  Oh god, your voice.  I just
remembered your voice.  How your soft accent and gentle words had soothed
and calmed me so many times.  Made me laugh, made me cry, and made me
very happy.  And then, that night, turning me on like I've never felt
before.  Our thoughts and feelings finally being made explicit,
verbalised, imagined, and felt, if only by my own hands.  Without doubt,
that was the best sex I have never had.  Knowing that the connection
between us was more than a mental one, more than a theory.  Discovering
just how much we could excite each other, and ultimately, feeling exactly
how intense the inevitable climax of that moment was.  I'd never felt
like that before, not even when I'd actually been having sex with people.
 Because that was with you.  And you, were something way more than
special.  I was in love with you.

It was more than that though.  My deteriorating mental health jeopardised
everything, leaving me feeling like I needed you even more, and expecting
that you would like me even less.  But I was wrong.  You stayed.  And you
became one of the best things in my whole life.  Second only to my
brother, who despite not having an intense sexual virtual relationship
with, was still the closest person to me in the world.  I told him all
about you, obviously.  Well, I didn?t go into details about the sexual
stuff, he's a cool guy but he doesn't need to know that about his little
brother.  Travelling over the water to be with him for a couple of weeks
was truly awesome, and of course, I could take you with me.  Five hundred
miles and five thousand miles doesn't really feel any different when no
part of you and me was actually physical.

Sadly, as you know, as you had to witness, from such a great distance,
and through the increasingly confused lens of our messaging and talking,
while I was out there with my brother I suffered a pretty complete
breakdown.  My symptoms got so much worse.  The voices got both louder
and more numerous.  My diagnosis shifted from bipolar to schizophrenia,
although it hardly mattered what anyone called it.  My own memories of
the next few weeks are vague at best.  But in talking to other people I
have pieced together some sense of how things were.  I remember you
telling me how I'd been calling you, scared, desperate, crying, begging
you to intervene and stop them taking me into the psychiatric unit.  And
later, when I was so stupidly overmedicated I could barely form words,
you were still there.  Always there.  Worried about me, jealous of a guy
you'd never met who was being a friend to me, and always trying to make
me feel better.  This was the time where I deliberately tried to tell you
to leave.  I was too much, undeserving of you, and unable to be the kind
of person you wanted, needed, and should have in a just world.  But you
ignored me, totally.  Refusing to go, not allowing me to do the only
thing I knew how, which was to hide and be alone.

To say that this was a messy few weeks for me would be an understatement.
 My grasp on reality, and ability to distinguish it from fantasy, was at
best weak, at worst, completely missing.  As I look back now, this was
probably the worst I have ever been, and can only imagine how difficult I
must have been to stay with.  But you did stay.

Out of that chaos, there were yet more revelations awaiting you.  I knew
it, as much as you did by then.  There were still some aspects of my life
that were fantasy, not reality.  Important fantasy though, the kind that
I resort to to survive, when reality is just too scary, or too difficult,
or too terrible for me to comprehend.  But you needed to know.  I needed
you to know.  I remember feeling so scared.  Terrified that in telling
the most awesome boy in the world about the real me, would mean that he
left.  I was risking losing you, and you, were everything.  By then, we
had plans.  Half jokingly and half fantasising about our future life
together, we talked about those plans.  How we would go to university
together.  How we would get married.  How we'd be living in that house in
the countryside, with the children we'd have adopted by then.  Christmas
around the fireplace.  Such beautiful and enjoyable future memories.  Our
entire life, such a happy and joy filled life, was at risk in me
admitting the deepest parts of myself to you.

And again, you stayed.  Surprising me, to say the least, but also,
reinforcing just how incredible you really are.  It was as if we were
starting over, even though we knew so much about each other already, this
was it.  The true beginning of what was to be the rest of my life.  Our
life.  Our future.

So I wasn't expecting it.  There wasn't that nagging doubt, or any
feeling that things were just not quite right.  Quite the opposite
actually.  But my catastrophising tendencies kicked in to overdrive when
I read your message.  I remember it clearly.  I was in London with my mum
for a work thing of hers.  It was a bad weekend for me because I had been
fucking around so much that I was only just in time for the train and had
left some important stuff at home by accident.  It was lunch time, I was
sitting on a bench by the river, not that you asked me, when it started.
 If I lied to you would you forgive me?  That was the question.  And as
soon a I saw it, my heart was racing.  Oh please, please no.  Don't let
this be it.  I don't want this to be it.  The irony was, I hadn't even
begun to imagine how bad things were actually going to get.  We'd had
slightly awkward phone sex the night before, and again that morning.  You
had some sexual hang-ups, and I was thinking that maybe you'd lied about
just how satisfying those times had been.  Maybe you hadn't really
enjoyed them as much as I had.  I know I did.  But no, that wasn't it,
was it.  In just those few short messages, inexplicably,
incomprehensibly, everything was gone.

You're not fifteen.  That's not your name.  Those pictures, oh those
pictures, they aren't of you.  You don't play rugby.  The brothers and
sisters you talked about and I had talked with weren't real.  It almost
doesn't look like much does it?  Yet it felt, feels, like everything.
 Which it sort of is.  Everything I knew to be true about you.  The
things I loved about you, the things I didn't like about you, it all, was
a lie.  What happened next was the strangest mix of feelings.  Assuming
it was true, which you were emphatic about, and why would you make it up,
I couldn't make sense of it.  I needed to talk to someone, to tell them
what had happened, to help me make sense of the emotional chaos I found
myself surrounded by.  I wanted to call you.  Not you, but my you.  I
wanted to call the boy I knew, not the guy I was trying to understand I
didn't know.  I wanted to hear your voice. And then when I did, it was
just even more confusing.  Because, quite obviously, you sounded just
like him.  Because you were him, sort of.  Except you were in no way him.
 He had just died, suddenly, unexpectedly, horrifically.  Perhaps some
kind of brain injury from a terribly rugby incident ? I'd feared that often
enough, and now I found myself wishing it was true.  Because that would
actually have been better than this.

It sunk in, and became true, over time, and in waves.  Much like the
other feelings, coming and going unpredictably.  How could you do this to
me?  Why?  Oh really just fucking why?  And how could I have been so
stupid to believe it was true?  To believe that someone as awesome as
him, would ever be as interested in me as it felt he was.  I find myself
still going over our chats and conversations.  Were there clues?  Maybe,
but I wasn't in any kind of state to see them or understand them.  The
pictures, that was some of the hardest stuff to make sense of.  And the
made up family.  And the made up life.  You didn't even play rugby.  I
fucking watched rugby and tried to understand the stupid fucking violent
game so that I could understand you a bit better.  And what did you do?
 You fucking lied.

So yes, I'm furious with you.  I hate what has happened, and how I feel.
 Yet I don't hate you.  I wish I could, that would maybe be easier.
 Perhaps it's just a fantasy, but maybe there were parts of you,
genuinely, in the boy you pretended to be, the boy I feel in love with.
 I'm probably not blameless in this.  I know enough about myself to see
that I'm a difficult person to love.  I'm complicated, spiky, scared, and
just a little bit properly crazy.

It's been a couple of weeks now.  And things are settling down, sort of.
 I can see that probably what you need is a friend.  But I can't be that
person, I don't know how.  I still catch myself thinking about the boy I
loved, and then having to remember that it was all a lie.  There's a
unsettling sense of this remaining unfinished.  Perhaps that will always
be there, because maybe we are, forever, unfinished.  I find it difficult
to settle on any particular emotion when I think about you. I miss you,
terribly, even though I know that the boy I miss so much wasn't real.
 And I find myself worrying about you.  What must you be going through to
have to behave like this?  And just occasionally I wonder to myself if
even this lie, the lie of all lies, is, itself, a lie.  Maybe I am too
much, maybe you couldn't deal with my own, admittedly crazy and hard work
issues.  So this could all just be you way of leaving.  I'll never know.
 But I think that will be OK.  That boy I met, the one you were so
insanely jealous of.  Well, I saw him again, and it turns out you were
right to be jealous of him.  Not that anything will materialise from a
few days of fun with him.  He's five thousand miles away and so only just
more real than you were, even if I have been able to physically touch
him.  Still, it was good to be reminded that there are real people, who
like me for who I am.

So goodbye, whoever you are.  You have singly given me the absolute best
and worst of times.  You have touched my life forever, and maybe I did
the same for you too.  I hope so.  At least that way, it wouldn't all be
a crazy power play on your part.  You will stay with me, I think, always.
 But not as a ghost, or a fear, or something to be avoided.  At best, as
the memory of the boy who never was.