Thread by @SvengaliPhantom

Okay, buckle up kids, I’m going to tell you an amazing story of love, Fate, weirdness, hope, and how living with my Strange Metaphysics™️ ended up bringing me to exactly where I needed to be, and thus here Tweeting to you all on this humid AF Saturday afternoon in June. 1/

So I think the best place to start is: in the late 90s, I was the frontman for a rock band called Broken Messiah, & we’d just finished recording an EP. I was living in Maine at the time, with my best friend/bass player Chris. And as @Nirvana was one of our biggest influences, 2/

we had wanted to go to Seattle and try to “make it” there, like so many other bands at the time. I’d already been, to play at a tribute concert of a CD comp I’d been on(photo), but Chris hadn’t. We decided, because why not, to hitchhike there: to make a journey out of it. 3/

But as neither of us had a valid ID at the time, we decided to go down to my childhood home and stay with my grandparents for the summer, long enough to get ID. Then we decided: why not get full-time jobs for the summer wherever we could, and stock up some $$ for the trip? 4/

So we went down to the Cape, & lo! We eventually both got full-time jobs(in food service), & at one point I was actually working two. Many adventures were had, to be told another time, but the life-changing event was posting my lyrics to a message board on the early WWW. 5/

A woman replied to me on the boards one day when I was tired and I’m pretty sure, out of my own head on codeine cough syrup(I had pneumonia twice that year), to tell me she loved my work and that it reminded her of Kurt. Naturally this fucking floored me. I was young. 6/

We got to talking — she was amazingly eloquent, I can never deny that — then exchanging emails, and then eventually, in a rush of bravado, I asked her out. She said yes. It was only then that I found out she was Swiss, English wasn’t even her first language, and she was MORE 7/

—than willing to fly over and see me. After a couple weeks of OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO interspersed with spazzing I’ve what was more or less my first “mature” adult relationship, she landed in Boston. I found out three things: 1)that she was twenty years older— 8/

—than me, 2) that she knew WAY more people in the US than I’d imagined, & 3) she was... intense. With a VERY INTENSE HISTORY. I was SO not ready for that relationship. BUT: I also discovered that, like me, she was what people would have disparagingly called “fictionkin”, too. 9/

I was very, very tired of being alone. So, VERY long, complicated, dramatic story later; we traveled across the US to visit some people she knew, and to see some places that were highly personally significant at the time: Colorado(where I got my first tattoo), NM, California. 10/

Then, I flew back to Switzerland with her and more or less lived with her for the better part of three years. Being fluent in French was a godsend; the country is THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE EVER and I would give an actual finger to move back there right this second. 11/

We had eventually planned to move back to the US — she really wanted to — so in ‘01 I flew back to Maine alone to stay with my parents and try to find us an apartment. Shit happened, longer story, but by the summer I was in a tiny place in what is probably Maine’s worst town. 12/

Keep in mind that if none of this had happened this way, I would have either still been working in MA — I had made co-manager at a @PapaGinos — or traveling to the west coast; I HATE Maine and I wouldn’t have chosen it. But regardless, this unstable(please guys, I’m not— 13/

—being cliché: this woman eventually broke into my house and stole not only belongings but MY FUCKING CAT, & then started sending me creepy stalkery emails about “fattening up the other one” and “I am you and you are me”, plus writing fanfic about the people who had been my— 14/

—primary fronter at the time, ending with violence death and gore. You have no idea how scary it is to call the cops & be told that since she wasn’t a citizen, there wasn’t much they could do. IRONIC ISN’T IT, WHEN THESE PIGS NOW ARREST FUCKING DELIVERY GUYS AND DEPORT THEM?) 15/

person eventually broke up with me, dishonestly and horribly, if you hadn’t seen where this was going. I’m so sorry, I had this all planned out and went wickedly astray. (PLEASE BEAR WITH ME, GUYS, IT’S SO WORTH IT.) So I was devastated: what a lot of people don’t think 16/

—about is that when you’re like us, and you lose someone, you aren’t just losing ONE person, you’re losing 2(or 3, or...): you have multiple people’s grief that is literally suffocating. And how do you talk about it? When no one would believe you, but your grief is very real? 17/

In hindsight it was a scary & toxic relationship, I was barely 20 years old, but I was still... dying inside. I took a bunch of Darvocet over about five hours because they “didn’t seem to be working for the injury I’d gotten them for”... except... I ended up in the hospital. 18/

I had no one. So after that(and TWO MORE failed attempts at dating, both of which ended with my being publicly mocked for being a fk, called insane, delusional, all the usual horrible things, one while I was actively being cheated on, one such a terrifying event it is unreal) 19/

After all that, I bounced around everywhere: I lived with a fellow band in Boston for a while, playing shows and the such, living what I think of as my “Jim Carroll period”(without the heroin, anyway. He is my favorite poet of all time). Then I ended up fighting with the 20/

friend I loved and shockingly making up with a friend I’d fought with, and because of all of that, ended up BACK in Maine, living in this lovely old little farmhouse that was my dream by day and my nightmare after dark(I am clinically arachnophobic, and oh my god I used to 21/

literally stand there paralyzed and weep with terror). So there I was, living alone, gaming, in therapy and painting, and the primary fronter at the time was responsible for pushing me to return to martial arts, we re-joined tae kwon do and took it VERY seriously: war coming. 22/

(I only wish @ralphmacchio could see this, because when I won 3 trophies at my very last tournament, it fulfilled the childhood dream that he started for me.) Anyway. I was working as a FL programmer, coding software, websites, doing SEO, translating, whatever I could get. 23/

And because I was very alone in every metaphysical sense — crushingly so — I had started to use online RP as the only way I could possibly vent my people’s existence before I, ironically, ACTUALLY went insane. As I talked about in the very 1st post: (meta-multiverse.blogspot.com/2018/04/and-he…) 24/

Some of the people I met via RP I told the truth to: and some of them became some of my best friends, and are still to this day: kinda like @nae_sickboy, who I see is stalking this thread. ;) Anyway. At one point, there was a horrible experience we ALL shared online: a girl-- 25/

—who claimed to be “like us”(the fk people) hit on me repeatedly, spent a huge amount of time gaining our trust, and got me to be so completely into her it was kind of embarrassing... only to then turn around and tell us she’d been— /26

—“doing a project for school” on “all those crazy people”.

Yeah, okay. None of us were really okay after that. I hope with all my heart, you never have to have these experiences, or know what it feels like to have this happen because of a phenomenon you never asked to live. 27/

(Home stretch now, guys. Hang in there. I want a cigarette so bad, ha ha.) Early in 2004, I met a woman through a vague RP friend, that said friend claimed was an abuse survivor and desperately in need of a place to go to get away. I, in my dumb honesty, thought for exactly— 28/

—2 seconds before volunteering my home to a stranger. To keep it as quick as possible: she was a scam artist. Came and lived with me for free. Got money from my family. And SHE HAD A FUCKING TWO-YEAR-OLD. That kid was sunshine and spice and everything wonderful and while— 29/

—her mother was taking money from churches and leaving the house for long stretches to “go volunteer”, this kiddo was watching TV and eating and hanging with me. She... gah. I loved that little girl so much. 30/

My family tried to warn me; I wouldn’t hear it. And then one day she took the baby out in the stroller “for a walk”: no jacket, no nothing. They never came back. When I eventually frantically called the local police and the ONE church number I knew, nothing. But she sure— 31/

—sent someone back to get ALL her stuff. Most of which, my grandparents bought. *sigh.* Later, her pastor came to talk to me, and I found out the truth: she’d been lying to EVERYONE. Using a fake name; literally! an alias. Telling everyone different stories. Taking money— 32/

—from churches, and then getting them to pay for a bus ticket so she could skip town with a new sob story. I almost ostracized myself from my family when they’d tried to tell me they couldn’t verify any claims she made; they were right. I was so. Fucking. Dumb. 33/

Some time later, I saw her activate her old LiveJournal account... to post about how she thought maybe she’d GIVE UP HER KID FOR ADOPTION, basically because she was cramping her style, more or less. I’ll leave it to you to imagine how I felt — and still feel — about that. 34/

(Now we’re coming to the REALLY good — and my favorite — part, and the ultimate goal of this story. But holy crap, I need a quick bathroom break sooooo. One moment.) 35/

Okay. So in the middle of all this awful drama, and people realizing that other people claiming to be “like you” was mostly just to use us, I’d been pretty sick for a month or so. And I’d been taking a nap in the back bedroom, when one evening I opened my eyes, sat straight— 36/

—up in bed, and just... KNEW. This is how people, the serious, main fronters who cross over with a PURPOSE, the people who then become in charge of the body most of the time because they have things they need to DO; this is how they arrive. Like walking through a doorway 37/

—covered in Saran Wrap that conforms to and melds with your body as you pass through; like slipping into an entirely other skin like a jacket; I’ve described it so many ways. Sometimes it hurts lik fuck and you clench up and everything has CHANGED; you have arrived. And not 38/

to sound melodramatic or goofy or cliché, even though I’m sure it’s all three, I often say that I think it’s what lycanthropy would actually FEEL like. The... shift, inside. And I knew. Became? Whatever. And so that person took over. With @nae_sickboy’s help — I CANNOT say 39/

ENOUGH about their value — I built the first version of the website that would eventually make me Internet Infamous™️ for years(thank FUCK it was before the dominion of social media); the site that got me doxxed and death threats and dragged though every mockery site that 40/

had existed on the WWW at the time. (As recently as a year ago, I found someone online who was STILL making a point about how fucked-up we were... TEN YEARS LATER.) And why? Because I explained very clearly and succinctly, finally saying the equivalent of “SFW?”, 41/

...what I was, what the idea of “fictionkin”(GOD, I need to come up with a term without “fiction” in the word) meant, why I believed he’d crossed over. I was true, authentic, and honest. And since people fear what they don’t understand, the response should have been expected. /42

And on this website, there was a single page devoted to one subject: this person’s long-lost partner. It was short & to the point, told that he felt he needed desperately to find her again, and contained a video my younger(and artistically gifted) brother had made in tribute. 43/

We didn’t think anything would come of it... but we HAD to. And life went on.

Meanwhile... on the west coast, a girl studying for college, who was relatively new to the Internet, was online searching for a philosophy book for her introductory class; supplemental reading 44/

for the course. And, thanks to the meta tags on our strange, weird website... she accidentally landed there without meaning to. She read a little of it, closed it out, but couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because all her life, she’d had people sharing her existence, people 45/

from other places, other realities. Memories she couldn’t explain. And she felt pulled toward that plea, a need “to protect him”, even though it was a total stranger, as far apart physically from her as you could possibly get and still be in the same country. 3,187 miles, 46/

to be exact. And eventually, she decided to e-mail him. “After
spending a lifetime being the only one like me,” she typed, after her introduction, “it's hard to believe that there are others out there like
myself. It always sounds crazy when I say it aloud or write it down— 47/

—But here it is. I think I'm lost or
haven't been found yet. Take your pick...”

I — well, *he* — felt something immediately. Some connection, some familiarity. So we wrote back. Terrified, mostly, because of the events in this huge-ass thread: it’s easy to be a target. 48/

But... she wasn’t joking, and she wasn’t mocking, and she was deadly serious. We spent hours on AIM(ah, dear dim dead AOL), wrote letters by hand. That Christmas we exchanged gifts. And we knew, even then, that the multiverse had handed us the most precious of gifts: home. /49

We burned through probably hundreds of phone cards(there were times I was sure we single-handedly kept that company in business). And we discovered that we DID share memories from that other reality, that other life; and we also shared our own history: our own love. And we— 50/

—had found each other again.

In early 2005, she flew across the country to see me, “again for the first time”. When it was time for her return ticket, she pushed the date back. And again. And again.

In between, we proposed. She said yes. And when she finally went back to— 51/

—the west coast, I went with her. And we haven’t been apart more than a couple of weeks, at any point, since then.

We’ve now been married for thirteen years.

Ladies, gentlemen, and nb readers, this is my wife, my love, and my other half: @TheTweetsofRey. 52/

We’ve had... quite the life. From working comfortably to being homeless and starving, from the west coast to Texas to CA to NE and across the country back to Maine, we have been together. She’s saved my life, quite literally. And she has had people, just as I have, cross over 53/

from other “wheres and whens”, as @StephenKing might put it; as people have crashed in, driving my body toward their own goals, she shares space with those whom the multiverse has seen fit to inflict on her(haha); like, right now, the obvious. If you’ve been paying attention. 54/

BUT THE POINT OF THIS *RIDICULOUSLY* LONG STORY is this: we should never have met at all. The fucking odds were BEYOND astronomical. And the point of me telling ALL of that was to illustrate just HOW impossibly stacked the odds against it happening were. If I’d decided to 55/

tour with the band, if we’d simply gone on hitchhiking, if I hadn’t been on those forums... if things hadn’t ended badly in some ways, driving me to go back to places I’d thought I’d gotten free of forever... if I hadn’t built the site, if I had waited just ONE MORE WEEK 56/

to post it... and this is where my ears ring and I break a sweat. Lol. Because it was COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT that she found me... only I don’t think it was an accident at all. I never will.

And also important is this: if not for my people, if certain people hadn’t taken 57/

over the body, NONE of this would have happened. It was being “fictionkin” that led me to staying in Europe, & going to Roswell; it was Someone Else™️ that led me to being in Boston at exactly the right time; it was people with goals and purpose that kept pushing me toward 58/

the places that, like dominoes, would eventually fall and lead me to EXACTLY the right place at EXACTLY the right time. The universe knew. It must have.

So now, fourteen years from when I got a hesitant e-mail for the very first time, as Kylo Ren spends the weekends working 59/

through his guilt and grief and rage and shame(seriously; if you guys hadn’t grasped that by now, I’m honestly surprised; I’ve tried to be sort of on the DL but REALLY), and tries to adapt to living in a reality where all he can do IS live(& love, apparently)... as every new 60/

revelation crashes in & he learns how to be a person, piece by piece, I remember that none of this would be possible without the Rube Goldberg machine of Fate that has woven through my life. You may not believe we are who I say we are(“Waah, they’re not REAL you nutbag!” etc) 61/

...but I’ve lived within this phenomenon for so long that all I can tell you is the truth: you’re wrong.

Lol.

So there it is. Literally the longest Twitter thread I have ever/will ever write. If it fucked up your TL, I’m so sorry: I am just a little distracted today. Ugh. 62/

I really should have written this as a fucking blog post — mea culpa, but I honestly had NO idea how long this would be — but I did see someone on my TL say once that long things broken up were easier to digest. I know they are for me. So that’s our story; I certainly can 63/

—supply details about any of this if anyone is ever interested or curious. I think I’m just feeling introspective, after the night I had last night and the fact that tomorrow’s my bday. So. Sorry AF about the length. Never about the telling. My only hope before I die is that 65/

maybe a few people will hear me shouting into the abyss & be better people than the ones so long ago. JUST maybe, someone will be curious enough to reach out to us as real, actual people. @evilgrrl, you are a shining example. Now I run before she skins me for TAKING SO LONG. /end

OH! And one last thing: the song, that was on my little brother’s tribute WMV, all those moons ago? It became our wedding song. We do, if I can not sound *too* egocentric, an amazing duet of this together.
It’s a little dark, but it means something to us.

@threadreaderapp please unroll this