Bayleigh

If you hang out with kids who were raised by the internet, you’ll hear a lot of stories about a certain flavor of teenage online relationships. There’s codependence, negligent parents, a compulsive addiction to tragedy, and of course, never meeting in real life. It happened to me, clearly. His name was Henry and I met him on this music app called SongChat. He was from Alaska and we began talking a lot and drawing pictures for each other. We clicked so hard and fast that everyone else started to seem as boring as a dictionary. There’s this Madonna song that goes, “Walking down the crowded avenue, other faces look like nothing next to you.” I never met the guy, but still, the queen said it best.

Once I caught wind of Henry’s aesthetic, so cool even in the absence of people, I was hooked. He had strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, and a sinister face with angles you could cut yourself on until he smiled, and his smile killed me inside because I couldn’t capture it in a jar and preserve it in some kind of Henry museum.

He lived in a basement in a midcentury modern house. He could barely leave that basement, a behavior which was clearly agoraphobia, and he wasted his days away playing old video games and reading long fantasy series (he tried to get me to read Game of Thrones, but I was bored out of my mind). All the food and drugstore stuff came from his mom, a sweet enabling woman who descended his stairs several times a day.

I started to get pretty obsessed with Henry. I felt like I needed to talk to him constantly, and when he was doing anything besides giving me attention, I started thinking that he hated my guts. This happens with a lot of people, but this time these feelings were a lot stronger than usual. I didn’t even know that was possible.

Henry

 Bayleigh and I met on an app I forget the name of, one of the many I downloaded during my “I express my love for music through iPhone apps” phase.  It was supposed to match you to people with similar taste, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t do that. At the time I was listening to a lot of doom metal and Tchaikovsky, which she wouldn’t listen to if her life depended on it. She was into Lady Gaga and FKA Twigs, or was it Grimes? All those electropop artists sound the same to me.

On the app I was pretending I was one year older, and she was pretending she was two years older, but it turned out we were both 15. We were different in most ways. I didn’t exactly know anyone, and she had so many friends I couldn’t keep track of them all. Then there were the hookups, which I also couldn’t keep track of. She had a long list of at least 20 boys and girls in a Word document ready to send, even though she was only fifteen when we met. A few were from the internet, a few were from school, and some she just talked up on the street. It intimidated me. At that point, I had only been to second base with one girl, and I’m genuinely surprised that I made it that far.

This didn’t keep me away, though. In fact, Bayleigh and I found ourselves talking all the time. We had an instant understanding where we could comprehend exactly what the other person meant, even if we said it when we were exhausted, and it made no sense.

At first it was platonic, and then one night she exploded, telling me every single sexual act she wanted to do with me. From then on, all of it came in a storm. First came the sexting, then nudes, then “Skype sex,” which she was very experienced with. It turned out that Skype sex was just two people watching each other masturbate over webcam. I had to dig through the garage to find my brother’s old webcam, but this was very important to me, so I put up with the dust.

Bayleigh and I continued to talk constantly. We were finding ourselves in a relationship. There was nothing else we could call it.

Bayleigh

Henry’s basement room was gorgeous and should have been photographed for Architectural Digest. It had a wooden floor with a dark green rug covering most of it, and the ceilings were tall with big windows toward the top on one side. During our Skype dates he would sometimes point his webcam toward the windows so I could see unfathomably beautiful Alaskan sunsets.

The room was huge with a queen bed in the corner, covered with a red duvet. This basement was clearly made to be a game room, but instead it served as a teenage boy’s one and only existence space. This room looked like a little haven, though, and I hardly felt bad for him, staying in there all the time.

Henry had never had sex when I met him. I certainly didn’t get to take his virginity, since we never saw one another in person. It was strange on his part that we had fallen in love, since he had never really loved anyone else in his life. I wished he was my “first love,” but by that point I had already fallen in love with 50 other people.

His romantic past was sparse, and he had only had two girls to speak of. One was a big crush on a classmate from 7th grade, Steph, that never went anywhere. He said she was a junior champion skier who had a lot of friends, which made me insanely jealous. I had never gotten the chance to go skiing. I started looking at a bunch of skiing equipment and clothes online, adding stuff to carts and never checking out.

When he was in 9th grade, before he switched to homeschool, Henry had a girlfriend for a month. Her name was Tiana and it wasn’t much of a relationship. She liked the idea of him, and so she pressured him into a relationship and took his first kiss. This girl was stereotypically emo, side bangs and fishnets and the whole nine yards. She made me insanely jealous too for a while. I used to look at Steph and Tiana’s social media accounts all the time. At night, while other people were watching reality TV or what have you, I poured myself some cheap stolen wine, changed into a silk slip, lit some sandalwood incense, and stalked the shit out of these girls on my MacBook. I would have Facebook open, talking to Henry, with Tiana and Steph up in another tab. I’ve looked at every post they’ve both made on all their social media accounts, even Pinterest. Not sorry.

Henry

Bayleigh wrote me letters sometimes, and she sent me a few packages filled with tea bags and crystals. It was so bizarre and frustrating to think her physical body was inaccessible, but thanks to the US Postal Service, which is much cheaper than a plane flight, here were things she had touched, handled, and written herself. Since I’m more of a typer, I never mailed her back. But her handwriting was enchanting. It was that generic bubbly handwriting that 70% of girls have, but due to how I felt about her, I could still find uniqueness in it.

As it was, she and I could never walk side-by-side in, say, a mall, the same mall at the same time. It comes off like such a simple pleasure, but when it comes to long distance, you begin to long for it until it feels like you’re hitting your head against a wall over and over.

I never tempted the dream of meeting, although we talked about it all the time. She told me about her favorite places she’d take me to if I came to Iowa. A farmer’s market, an ice cream place with amazing milkshakes, a park with enormous sculptures. I couldn’t think of many places to take her in Anchorage, since I didn’t really go anywhere. Maybe walking along one of the many lakes or going to the shop where I hunted for comics. But I didn’t let myself fantasize for long. Travel is expensive, and what were we going to do—tell our parents that we were in love with online strangers?

One night in the summer, I went outside to check the mail. I almost never went outside, but my mom had left town, and I knew Bayleigh had mailed me a gift. I looked at the mass of stars above my head and I thought, this sky is too wide. This planet is big enough, with Internet speeds quick enough, so that you might meet someone you love that you can’t ever touch. I went back inside and opened her gift. It was a deck of tarot cards. Her note said that she knew I was skeptical, but that I should consider them for personal guidance. I put them on my desk and never used them. Soon they moved to my bookshelf. Now they’re in my closet.

Bayleigh

Henry and I were both extremely depressed. It could have been the main thing we had in common. After the fiery honeymoon phase started to wear off, we turned to talking a lot about how we wanted to kill ourselves. We were mostly speculating, but at some points we were serious, debating the superior methods. We ended up staying alive because we were so obsessed with one another. Either way we had become completely codependent, feeling emptiness when we weren’t in communication. I would always sneak texts to him any chance I got, living in my Henry world alongside my actual one. Every day I imagined driving up to see him through Canada, doing charcoal sketches of moose and buying jewelry and blankets from indigenous market stalls. I became obsessed with the idea of the Alaska-Canada border. I looked at photos of crossing points on Google Images, made one my desktop wallpaper, and painted another one for art class. That border spoke to me. It said, Canada is beautiful, but you’re an American, now you’re home again. And by the way, the love of your life isn’t all that far from you.

There was such a duality between the fever dream fantasies I had staring up at my ceiling and the harsh reality that felt like skinning my knees over and over. My mom was making a lot of little nasty comments about my body, calling me a piggish whore, and I was jamming my fingers down my throat after just about every meal. I was waking up every morning wanting to be dead, slowly dragging myself through my day by riding off my passion for Henry. His problems were a bit less complex although maybe just as bad. There was that whole agoraphobia thing, and his older brother Eddie had gotten caught by the fuzz for selling drugs.

One night I was sobbing and typing to Henry all my worries over Facebook for a few hours. Maybe I shouldn’t have, since the next morning he said that he didn’t think he could do this anymore. I was devastated and thought maybe this is what it was like for a normal person to have a death in the family. I screamed into a pillow, sexted five guys from my school, and punched a hole in the wall in my brother’s room (nobody owned up to it). I took the carving knife my great uncle Maximillian had given me, which had a beautiful ivory blade, and carved Henry’s name across the tops of my thighs. He knew none of this. After a few weeks in an acidic agony pool, Henry and I finally started reconciling and continuing on as friends. I guess it was really hard for us to stay away from each other. I often thought he and I had a cosmic link going back to the beginning of the world, and that we would meet many, many more times in the future.

Henry

Our relationship eventually became nothing but a mess of our problems. Bayleigh had it worse than me for sure. She was supporting her dad because he couldn’t make enough as a tree trimmer. She would give him half or more from her smoothie shop paychecks, which went toward bills and sometimes insultingly unnecessary spending like beer and car detailing.

Bayleigh’s mom (whose name was unbelievably “Debbi Roach Bush” according to Facebook) was also being pretty awful to Bayleigh about her body. She had pretty bad bulimia and body image. Awkwardly, she wanted to be a professional model and her Tumblr was mostly pictures of skinny models. I don’t think she would have made it. She was tall, but she just wasn’t the bone thin person she wanted to be, not even close. She really didn’t like her boobs and she saw them as the big obstacle toward a modeling career. I liked them, obviously, but I would never want to carry them around all day like she had to. She said she was a size F, which I didn’t know existed until meeting her. On a few really depressing nights, she claimed was going to cut them off with a butcher knife. She had it all figured out: she was going to quickly throw them in the garbage disposal so the doctors wouldn’t attempt to reattach them, then call 911 and lie there, bleeding, until they came. I talked her out of this several times.

With her mom on her case, Bayleigh began to ask for reassurance about her body from me twice as much. Yet, I saw photos of her actual body about half as much as before. I wanted to help, but she was immune to it. She hated herself no matter what, and in the end it was just more important to her to obsess about and hide her body than to share it with me.

I had my share of problems, too. My brother had stopped hanging out with me in my room, and when my mom brought me food, she told me he had been out of the house a lot. Sometimes I could hear stomping and screaming above my head, which woke me up in the middle of the night and kept me up for hours. One day, my mom came down crying, empty handed, without my breakfast. She told me Eddie had not only relapsed, but he had been arrested for selling heroin. Soon she told me she was throwing all my college money away on a lawyer. I was surprised that I at one point had a college fund. I think my parents thought they were raising normal kids for a while and took all the normal steps, and then realized we were hopeless and gave up the act.

I worked up the courage to message Bayleigh and tell her that I was sorry, that I loved her, but this relationship wasn’t good for me. And as quickly as I found myself in a relationship, I was no longer in one. She was upset, but she seemed to hold it back. She described cutting herself and punching walls, but she didn’t cry at me. All things considered, it was a good breakup. I attempted a slow fade after that, but she would talk to me often and mention that she would probably hurt herself if she didn’t have me. I went with it, which in retrospect was spineless. But she didn’t try to make things romantic, and it was nice to have someone to talk to, so it wasn’t all that bad.

Bayleigh

Henry and I were friends for a good while, maybe half a year, before things all went to shit. One day, out of nowhere, he told me he wanted to ball and gag me, which really got me going. I pushed aside all doubts and just dove right back into that headspace. We sent each other nudes and I was sure to wear my collar in mine. I started to live in the idea that we would rekindle our love, get married, and do road trips through forgettable states, soothing our cranky children with Sillybandz (I loved those; I had practically every princess/vampire/werewolf etc pack). I could have sworn a few times that Henry and I were actually married with kids. I remember one of them was named Anthony.

Several days later, I received horrible news. It was a confession. He apologized and told me that we weren’t getting back together at all. He told me he had only sexted me because he was desperate while his new girlfriend was away. Yes, new girlfriend. And not only that, but the girlfriend was his 26-year-old tutor. I don’t even want to describe what it felt like hearing that. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. Fuck that suicide hotline bullshit, I thought. They all just pretend they care. I wanted to lock myself in my room, do whatever I could to numb the pain, and not burden anyone else. It was a pain so deep that the rare person who could understand it would run for their life.

Henry

Near the end of the summer, my mom said she was too busy with my brother’s legal stuff to help with homeschooling anymore. I had been going to this virtual school for a while, but my mom was helping with the motivation. She said she was hiring a tutor to come once or twice a week to keep me on track instead, and I said sure. Must have been a little cheaper than a lawyer.

This tutor, Audrey, had a slender body and straight brown hair down to her ass. She was a bit too into Disney, but she was an unusually empathetic person, so I let that slide. I told her about my brother’s legal issues and she looked at me with big, gentle eyes. I knew then that she was someone I could trust.

One day, our elbows and wrists started bumping a lot during our tutoring. There were apologies at first, but then they stopped. Then in the middle of one of my sentences, she intentionally grabbed my hand and stared at me right in the eye. An alien part of my psyche had finally woken up. This was a real, live woman, and I had no idea how much I needed it.

We kept up our tutoring at least a little bit, if just to get my mom’s money’s worth. Audrey started sneaking down to my room when my mom was asleep or at work. We talked for hours, cuddling and kissing. And fucking, of course. If my mom knocked on my door, Audrey would hide in the bathroom as I made that slow ascent up the stairs. Bayleigh was paling in comparison. I thought, did I ever love Bayleigh at all, or was she just a best friend that I had fake sex with?

One weekend, Audrey flew to Washington for her grandma’s funeral. That’s when I did something stupid. She wasn’t talking to me as much, and I realized how alone I felt without her. I fell into a tailspin of thinking that she didn’t really love me. Then, like I usually do at 6 PM, I became very horny. This, combined with the panic, really got to me and so I messaged Bayleigh with our typical sex chat openers. Unsurprisingly, she reciprocated. Photos were exchanged. The moment I came, dread washed over me. I wanted to keep it an isolated incident, but Bayleigh kept bothering me for more, multiple times a day. She might have thought we were getting back together. And so I came clean and apologized, saying that it was a one-off and that I didn’t intend to start anything up again. But then she begged me for details. She kept asking over and over, sometimes ten messages in a row, until she knew everything that I also knew about Audrey. It’s hard to still not be angry at Bayleigh for that.

For some reason, I claimed Audrey was 26. She was actually 22. I didn’t really think about it. That fake age just fell out of my mouth. When I began to look back on it, I figured that I was trying to pretend I wasn’t as guilty. Like maybe I was some kind of victim, taken away by an older woman. But she was 22, and the guilt is all mine.

Bayleigh

I was desperate for relief from this hell of Henry loving someone else. I went to get my mom’s Klonopin. I’d known about it and taken it sometimes for about a year. I love to rummage through medicine cabinets, what can I say? I’m pretty sure my mom forgot to take the pills since her only real anxiety drug is Dr. Phil and being a Christian housewife. I poured all of them in my hand then went back to my room, downing them with some swigs of vodka I keep under the bed next to my flower crown supplies. I laid down on my bed, closed the canopy, and I started to get visions that I was going to reincarnate into my other life as an angel.

The next thing I knew, I had woken up in a hospital bed. Or was I backstage at a burlesque show? It kept flipping back and forth. I was talking to a three-eyed black leopard standing on its hind legs. He told me that I had a ways to go before becoming an angel again, and that dying would only set me back. But that he had known me as an angel, and that I was a good one, one that emanated a lot of serenity. We shared a cigar and talked for a long time about how hard it is to be a human. He told me we had encountered each other in my human life, in his human form. But he couldn’t tell me who he was. He said it wasn’t my time to find out.

I had definitely read somewhere that 75% of pill suicides don’t work and you end up fine, but for some reason I was not thinking that at all when I swallowed them. I really thought I was going to die, and I wanted to. When the visions of the burlesque show faded, I was back in that hospital room, halfway between hungover and dead. My mom and stepdad rushed over and hugged me and told me they loved me, which was out of character for them.

The doctors kept me there for a week. Those inpatient nurses LOVE making you do collages. They said I had a depressive episode and sent me home with some Prozac but I quit after a month, because let’s be real, that stuff does a number on your intestines. It’s been three years and I’m certain they were wrong. Since then, doctors have given me just about every “terrible” diagnosis out there; whatever it is, though, Risperdal is a wonder drug.

Although I fantasized about telling Henry about my suicide attempt to make him get back together with me (which I know is ridiculous), I ended up not telling him at all. Or even talking to him ever again. A therapist I talked to at the hospital told me this was the best course of action and I agreed with him. I didn’t block Henry and he never messaged me again. I looked at all 700+ photos I had of him over and over again for months, cherishing his face. Eventually I got sick of the photos. Other people I met in school were starting to distract me, and now that I was a senior, people were bringing me to college parties. Needless to say, those parties provided a certain and very needed kind of stimulation. Henry could never!

Henry

For a month afterward, I panicked about how I had cheated on Audrey. Every time I was with her, I felt a seizing anxiety in my chest like I had to confess. But once I subsumed myself in her warm, enveloping charm, my worry lay under the surface until it dissolved.

Bayleigh wasn’t talking to me at all, which didn’t hurt that badly since I had Audrey. We spent endless hours in my bedroom, talking and watching movies and shows. I put up with some Disney for her, but she liked Game of Thrones, so it was all well and good. Sometimes she brought me to her house when her parents weren’t home, and sometimes we even went out to a restaurant or something, her clutching my hand the entire time. After half a year or so, I realized that I was probably never going to hear from Bayleigh again.

I remembered Bayleigh’s Tumblr address because she had once told me excitedly that nobody else had taken the specific URL. It was “shatteredteeth.tumblr.com.” She documented her whole life there like it was nothing, posting every thought that came to her mind. After scrolling back for a while, I learned that she had attempted suicide the night I told her about Audrey. My heart crawled up into my stomach as I felt a burning recognition. That night I drank my usual coffee while putting a few cuts into my legs with an x-acto. I don’t want to say she gave me the idea, but it was the first time I ever tried it, so who could say?

I spent the next few weeks in a state that felt subhuman. I had to hide my pain around Audrey. When I was alone, I laid on my bed and imagined the same thought over and over again, of my house collapsing and crushing my body into fluid. I would have deserved it.

Bayleigh

My coven and I put a spell on Henry. I used a spell that my English teacher gave me; she let me call her Marjorie, which is her witch name. My coven (Goldbasket, Clara, and Bonnie) and I approached my altar in my closet during a dark moon phase at midnight. We used a black candle Clara poured herself and blessed with blackthorn oil. I took my great uncle Maximillian’s carving knife with the ivory handle and carved Henry’s full name into the wax. I then placed the candle in a silver bowl filled with dirt freshly collected from the marsh and lit it. Every time I had a negative emotion or memory of Henry I would take a pin and sink it deep into the wax. Each time I inserted a needle I felt deeply pained, but it was a good pain, expunging me of my demonic past. I would announce my memories out loud, releasing them into the air. The thought of him fucking his tutor, losing his virginity. Even the positive memories from when we were dating, like when he felt confident enough to send me a grainy photo of his naked form, lit by that industrial-looking desk lamp I had come to know well. Members of my coven would repeat the hex, “Strip him of his power over you and power in all the world.” We did it over and over again until thirty or so pins were stuck, and we concluded by anointing ourselves with rose water. I think it really helped to cleanse me of him.

One night at my altar several weeks later, I was praying to the Moon Goddess. She spoke to me and told me that Henry was suffering and repenting for how he treated me. I was elated. And so began the process of slowly moving on.

Henry

Audrey told me one day she was moving away for graduate school in Colorado. She was going to pursue a career as a high school science teacher, and she said she needed to be somewhere warmer. I tried to be happy for her, but I am a selfish person deep down and I didn’t want her to go at all. I cried a lot.

She and I had some goodbye time by the lake two days before she left. She gave me a quiet kiss on the cheek, and I couldn’t enjoy it at all, knowing this relationship was essentially over. After she left, I spent a little extra time outdoors. It was nice to gaze at the mountains and lakes, which Audrey loved to do, even though the breeze felt like needles stabbing into my skin.

Eventually my nostalgia for Audrey wore off, and the outdoors had much less appeal to me. Back in my house, I still had the life I had before Bayleigh. I had my room. I had my comic books and regular books and Game of Thrones. I started whittling spoons. My mom would always bring me whatever I needed. I thought, I gave upstairs a try, I gave love a try. Maybe I’m gonna stay downstairs. I don’t know when I’m coming back up. Things are good down here. I don’t know why I thought I needed anyone else.