Each week, we’re running a new installment of The Matter Mini-Series: “Love in the Time of Bae.” It’s the story of how two people met and fell in love in the 21st century—a simple story, except not.
Last week, 16-year-old Charlotte, who is really a cutter, really suicidal, and really gay, went online and met a troll named Sollux, who is really Anthony who lives 5,000 miles away.
It’s not like Anthony never got depressed. Who didn’t? But he wasn’t like these people who just cry on social all over the place about how dark and sad they are. He had reasons for his feelings. He’d been bullied by the same guys he was actually friends with in primary school, guys who turned jock and left Anthony behind, suddenly they turned on him and they made fun of his glasses and they punched him around a little. He got sad, really sad, and even one day took a stab at the cutting — a shallow line down his chest with a razor — but he remembered he didn’t like pain and stopped immediately.
Anthony says he was bullied because he wore glasses, which he does: Ones with lenses that magnify his eyes times a million, and real teen acne, dark red and layered on his cheeks. He wears hoodies and T-shirts from bands he calls hard metal, like AC/DC, because he was playing bass in a band with his best friend Charlie — Charlie, with his eyeliner and his own AC/DC T-shirts. Charlie, who rescued him from the torture of the bullying by teaching them that the world didn’t care about him so why she could care about the world. Charlie, who taught him how to fight, so that all it took was a few times and they finally learned what it meant when the hammer of justice crushes you and they never bothered him again.
Now, at 16, Anthony is at a college where he’s learning computer repair. Charlie’s at a different college but it’s just as well since Anthony’s going to move sometime next year. The economy in the town they live in is so depressed that not even Anthony’s 19-year-old brother or 22-year-old sister can find jobs. His mother works 12-hour shifts at the hospital that is almost quite literally in their backyard, and his father works at a fiberglass factory. Last year they took a family trip, all four of them, to Australia, where there was more sun and more opportunity. Life appeared easier there. They decided to move, but moving is expensive, and so they’ve been saving every penny to make it happen. Anthony was pissed at first, but now he’s not. He is not of Wales as much as he is of Twitter, or of Homestuck, or of Kik messaging. He’s of Skype, though the family computer is in the middle of the living room and that can get dicey. He lost his phone to a rainstorm and a puddle and a cracked screen.
All that to say that Anthony wasn’t depressed, he’s sure of it, and that’s a thing to know when you consider his behavior while roleplaying a character called Sollux from the online comic Homestuck. He’d gone insane, his Sollux did, and was in the middle of being gunned down from all sides. Aha! But he’s a computer expert, that Sollux, and he’d injected himself with nanomachines (a necessity, since in his other fights he’d lost both his legs from the knee down and his entire left arm). Those nanomachines kept him alive, and gave him instant healing power (think Wolverine, just a little slower). But the attempts on his life really started to piss Anthony—I mean Sollux—off so he killed himself just to show those fuckers. Remember that Sollux is also (twinArmageddons), which means he has a second soul, and so he’s not really dead. He comes back six months later, which is really immediately because the six months is indicated like this→look it’s six months later→now it’s 10 minutes later and so on.
When Sollux went insane like that, it scared Charlotte. Was there anywhere one could go and not find more suicide? Was everyone just going to kill themselves all the time, right in front of her? She said, “That’s you in a strange, bizarre way. You could be that crazy. I don’t think I can role play with you anymore.” But she’d still talk to him.
Meanwhile, Anthony had this girlfriend named Laura (not named Laura) who was clingy as hell and needs to be everywhere with him and who is making him wish he could go back to one of the online girlfriends he’s had—the ones who can’t demand too much of his time unless he allows it. The phone went and suddenly so did the incessant where-are-you-call-me-now texts. Did that leave more time for Charlotte? Or was everything slowly fading into dark while Anthony’s opportunities to be with Charlotte, to roleplay, [to talk], begin to take on a bright light? She’s gay, but all the girls say they’re gay now. It’s a non-issue. For him, saying you’re gay is like saying you live in San Diego, which she does. None of it felt quite insurmountable. And it wasn’t.
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Audio clips: Safe and Sound (Tonight Alive), And Justice For All (Metallica).
