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.