This is a flowery autobiography of sorts. Some of it is true. Some of it is misremembered, and some of it is made up. All of it is real in one form or another. This is also an experiment. Please feel free to vote and comment. If there is enough interest, I may continue.

There was a time the internet was new. It’s so integral to every part of our lives now that most of us old enough to remember a time without it don’t even remember how we managed. Needed a cooking recipe? Hope you copied it from that book at the Barnes and Noble. Maybe even the library. Want a movie? Walk your happy ass to the Blockbuster.

The internet was so young. Just like me. I didn’t know much about the world, even though I had traveled all over it in my thirteen years. Another school. Just one of many. But this school had computers. And the internet.

There weren’t a lot of filters back in this time. As long as it wasn’t obviously a porn site, it wasn’t blocked. Some poor mook had to go through and input all those porn sites by hand. So most chatrooms and forums were totally wide open for curious kids to find their way to.

I don’t remember the site it was on. Some domain long since reclaimed by the algorithm. I don’t remember how I had stumbled upon it. There weren’t any search engines at the time. But I did find it. I found this site, a forum dedicated to role play. And I was enthralled.

You must understand. My whole life was lived without friends. My mother was abusive. A gypsy, in every ugly thing it means. She wasn’t just my mother, she was my jailer, my tormentor, my whole existence. She fluttered with the wind and dragged me along after her, clawing and scrabbling for purchase, someplace to plant my feet– someplace to put down my roots. A potted plant, never given the benefit of a larger pot, just fresh dirt.

And when I defied her as a child defies their parents, she sent me away to a place meant to torture children already tortured by their families; by society; by those entrusted with their care. An asylum, sanctioned by the state, where a simple disagreement over canned spinach saw me 3 days of 5 spent in total isolation. A child. Hardly even seven. Hardly old enough to understand.

Maybe it saved me from the rampant sexual assault going on. Waking up in the middle of the night to see an adult in a child’s bed across from me. But I was too young to understand. I know what it did to me, though.

In the silence of a jail cell, staring out the slit of a window, what else was there to hear besides the voices that have followed me for the rest of my life. A life lived in effective isolation. Always moving. Always being moved. Spending as many nights on planes, trains and buses as in a bed. Never knowing where or when would be a place I would stay long enough to know names.

The only ones who could ever come with me were the voices. And I knew all their names.

The internet was new. It gave me a way to let everyone else know their names, too. On forums, in chatrooms, I was bound to find a few kindred souls among the vast ocean of humanity that I could not even conceive of at the time. And it sent me down a path of discovery that few people have ever experienced.

“And then he kissed her.”

I was frozen. That was the line I was left with? What am I supposed to do with that?

Today? Ha ha, oh darling, don’t drop me that ammo unless you intend to be writing to me with one hand, and that’s if I’m being lazy. But, back then? I was thirteen. Maybe I already had my period, but boys still had cooties. Gross.

“Um ... she kissed him back?”

My partner in this innocent crime of teenage exploration, the boy who had taken my literary virginity, was a kid from Canada. That’s what he told me. He was 15, and the way he wrote made me believe it. The same kind of innocence, entirely unsure but knowing that adults do this thing when they were horny. Right?

The story is ancient. It is the oldest one still with me. The bones of it that we wrote together still exist even in its most current form. The characters still dance in my head, tormenting each other in exquisite agonies that only an angry, twisted mind could piece together. But in the shallow world of children before the world wide web, before we were told to be angry about every little thing that we have no control over, before we could swipe left and find out what a “pussy” meant, or even see one without a special magazine, those two lines were everything. They were as good as porn.

Do you want me to say I touched myself to that? Yeah, I probably did. But I was thirteen. Stop thinking about that, pervert. Shit. The internet is full of weirdos, I swear.

Where was I? Oh, right. Somewhere between cloud nine and too far into the gutter for a child to be. And entirely uncomfortable.