The Humanization Of A Lurker

“Little boxes on the hillside…”, echoed dimly against the darkness of her bedroom. Malvina Reynolds sounded so melancholic with the wind howling outside the window on this eerie night. She frowned at the source of the music, her cell phone, and reminded the brain once more to never use songs she really liked as ring tones. It always seemed like a good idea to use her current favorite tune, until days like these hit. It was rather cute until the 35th time the phone rang in the last 20 minutes.

Sliding wearily from under the covers, her fingers searched the floor for the wretched thing. She blinks rapidly at the bright screen, stinging eyes trying to discern the name on the caller ID. Of course it was him, who else? This wasn’t the first round she’d fought against that person, so she knew what to expect and how long it would last. She had survived it almost 7 times, this being the final straw. This time it felt different. So, sticking to her guns, she ignored the call again and turned the settings on her phone to “SILENT”. She flipped the phone with the screen side on the floor to block the glowing coming from it as it rang incessantly, angrily despite her declining behavior towards it.

Her stomach felt sick, almost like it was turning itself inside-out and climbing steadily up her chest. The heartbeat thudded heavily in her head and throat, making her panic and uneasy despite knowing he couldn’t do anything to her. Nor would he, given the chance to be within a few steps from her, ever so much as raise his hand at her. He’d hold on to her for dear life and thank God she existed. She tried not to think about that, about how this man had managed to slide himself into every crevice of her head. How co-dependant their relationship had been from the beginning, full of emotional abuse and spiritual bonding. Ha! Those two concepts together in one same sentence. Was it really any surprise that they had almost killed each other? She grew even more impatient and almost wavered in her final stance as memories of how they met and what they had been through flooded the clouded thoughts floating over her head.

She had been in that chatroom before and knew some of the screenames as “old-schoolers”, or people that through the years had managed to survive the onslaught public chats often had on someone’s soul. The place was riddled with underground currents of drama and secret cliques or alliances that often destroyed newcomers within days. There were the usual leg-hump guys that were in there with the sole purpose of making lonely, desperate women feel like they had found someone to trust and confide in. There were the older ladies, maybe retired or rather successful businesswomen, who had no other hobbies than to feed off the gossip streams going on in chat and made the new ones think they’d found in them someone to trust and confide in. There were the young, depressed crowd who wanted to make everyone else down with them or high with them at times, and felt powerful when the ‘newbies’ would befriend them and spill their little hearts thinking they had found someone to trust and…well you get it. Nobody was what they seemed. Nobody in there was mentally or emotionally stable. Nobody was normal. Not even she was, or why would she live in there for 19 hrs of the day?

Some people in the room proclaimed he was crazy. Others professed love for his poetic soul. Some called him a ‘legend’, someone who had been there for more than a decade and despite the tides coming in and out of that snake pit…he always prevailed. He was always there. When all the other crazies call you crazy, you know its bad. So she maintained her distance. She saw him in the room, seemingly unmoved and unperturbed by the others’ taunts or greetings. He would be there for hours at end, idly posting long poems, even if everyone blocked him. She liked poetry, she liked that he hadn’t sent her an instant message trying to gain her trust or hump her ‘e-leg’, she was drawn by his mysterious silence…was he even real? So one night, at 3 a.m. she signed into her usual hangout room and there were a handful of screenames logged on. A few spoke of food, others of insomnia, the bots flirted poorly and the cheese stood alone. The cheese being him. He was posting poetry, never-changing as he was, to a room that probably had him in the ‘iggy-bin’ for the past 10 yrs. She read it, line by line, and found it soothing at that late hour of night when nothing comforted her. His 11 pt., italic Old Book Antiqua font in a pale lavender shade just scrolled endlessly in prose and romance up a screen, sliding in between bot greetings and crude immature one liners. How could anyone ignore it?

She had sent him a few private messages, not very personal ones, after some of his poetry. Most said “thank you, that was beautiful”, to which there were never replies. She’d go in the room at lunch time, or odd hours during work to find him there perpetually posting his poems. In one occasion she logged on and had an ‘offliner’ message waiting for her, in the pale font, simply saying “heh. You’re welcome”. It made her smile, it made her curious and it made her sad. Did he ever talk to anyone? How could someone that provided the room with something as beautiful as poetry be crazy? You could choose to read it or not…so why the hate? She was determined to spend more time reading his poems, something about his presence in the room soothed and slowed her mind down. It brought out a forgotten side of her she had neglected to feed for years. Every night, instead of reading books or poetry, she was going into a room full of strangers and predators looking for acceptance. Every night she drank until the emptiness inside her faded and she became the entertainer in the cyber world. He made her want to be sober enough to not miss the beauty found in words, the peace found in rhyme.

Here comes the moment she made up her mind, and set the catastrophe in motion. It happened a Tuesday in January, at 3:00 a.m. It started so peaceful, that thinking back on it now makes it almost seem like it was destined in both their lives to be there that exact second. A day before, a day after, the dynamics of it all wouldn’t have clicked. She logged into the chat room, somewhat drunk or mostly asleep, and saw the place was deserted with the exception of a few regulars from the other side of the world, who were in the middle of their working day and the omnipresent poet. There. In all his stagnant glory. She sank back in her couch and immediately relaxed once she started reading the poem he was posting. It seems he had favored this specific poem for the past 3 days, “Bianca Amongst the Nightingales” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and was idly posting it over and over; unaware and uncaring of what was going on in the room. She had read this poem once before when she was a young child, and thought it evoked loneliness and a feeling of despair, hopelessness. This was it, the moment she was waiting for all along. She started interjecting quirky little one-liners into his poetry, mostly when the he posted the “The nightingales, the nightingales” sentence…she’d reply a quick ‘the goddamn nightingales, sheesh!’. Suddenly, the most extraordinary thing happened. She made him break in between his poem to put an ‘lol’. Small, non-meaningful event to everyone else; but to her she saw that she had broken the barrier he held tight around him and made him seem more human.

So it began. Or maybe the end was what started that precise time in their history. A few days later the private messages started. Again, unlike the rest of the guys in the room who wasted no time making their intentions known (even the “older, serious chatters” ha!), their first conversation started with him asking her if she was an INFJ. She had no idea what he was talking about, and soon he explained about it being a psychological profile indication the type of personality one had. She read the traits of an INFJ character and didn’t pay much attention to what it meant, even though a clearer warning could not have rang. The conversation flowed easily into spirituality, invisible warfare being fought in other realms; and even though he seemed a little ‘off’, she couldn’t help but be drawn at such a calm deep thinking person. After a week or two, she was withdrawing herself from her usual online friends more and more, avoiding phone calls. She was spending almost every second of her free time in empty chat rooms where they both would post endless poetry while he alternated playing their favorite songs through the speakers. Soon there after she would play guitar in the chat just for him, and stumbled upon staying up until 4 a.m. just doing trivia between the both of them. It was safe and comforting, and habitual. He was much older, his deep warm voice and rich laughter would almost lull her to sleep every night.

Then the phone calls began, and they found they really had no reason to be online or in the chat rooms anymore. It was consuming, spending so much time together talking about nothing. About absolutely, nothing. Sometimes it was complete silence, listening to each other’s t.v. sets blaring and oddly enough, it was a sense of not being alone. Things continue in perfect bliss until she started also spending time with her other friends she had neglected. She’d tell him she was going to spend a few hours with them playing music or planning her trip to visit them in a few months, and he would get quiet and snippy. Other times he’d fly off the handle cussing her out and threatening to harm her if she ever stopped talking to him, serious threats. She knew he was bipolar, had known for a long time, but still it took her by surprise and often scared her to tears. She didn’t know if he really meant it or if it was just his bipolar and it would all blow over when his mood was over. Eventually, she couldn’t handle his threats and abusive words, she couldn’t handle what he turned her into. When they fought it was violent, she’d throw low blows she didn’t even know she was capable of, she’d aim to kill, she’d scream and get hysterical when he’d refuse to let her get a word in edge-wise. They weren’t even a couple! Were they? And just like that, it dawned on her. He saw her as more than a friend. Fuck.

She had a talk with him and explained that they could not be anything, that she didn’t see him that way but she did love him dearly as a friend. She tried to bring it up softly, to no avail. He really went off the handle then. “How dare you say you love me and reject me?” She stopped for a second and realized he was not capable of grasping the type of friendship where you tell your friend you love them. When he said “love you” he meant he LOVED you. Jesus. She had no choice but to say, that all she could offer was the friendship she always had and he would have to deal with her not being IN love with him. This, of course, prompted the catastrophe that was known as the Great Freak out of May. It wasn’t normal, she thought, that he acts in such a childish obsessive way. She now knew why he was declared clinically insane and was on disability. It went beyond being bipolar, and she was now even more terrified that the threats of showing up at her doorstep and creating havoc were materializing at a rapid pace. She offered a final offer of peace, a final offer of friendship, which he blasted over and continued his never ending insulting tirade. She blocked his screename and took him off her list. Then he produced at least 45 different screenames to PM her with every time she blocked one of them. Eventually she ran out of room in her iggy bin and had to change her settings to block every PM coming her way from someone that wasn’t on her buddy list. That stopped the IM’s…but not the emails. Emails threatening to post her info in the chat rooms, her name and address and phone number. Emails stating he would make her friends’ lives miserable. She replied a few to try to calm him down, but it seems that’s all he needed, some sort of affirmation that she was still affected and reading his emails. He continued the threats, to which this time she stopped replying. Until it all stopped. One final call did it. He had called her after a horrible last confrontation that left her shaking and in tears after saying she was through. She was curled up on the couch feeling like someone had died, when the phone rang and it was him. She answered, but said nothing. His voice was shaking and full of tears as well, and he simply said: “You are the one doing this to us, not me. So if this is it, finish IT. Say IT.” She took a deep breath and said: “I’m sorry J. I can’t do this anymore. This is over. Bye”. Just as she said bye, it felt like a brick was thrown on her chest and she was about to pass out from crying. She couldn’t remember when she had ever felt this way, was it normal? He simply cried out quietly: “I don’t believe this…” and hung up.

Months went by, and she didn’t hear from him in any way. The phone stopped ringing, the emails stopped coming after the last one he sent saying: “Because I love you, I’m willing to leave you alone. I never meant to harm you. I guess I didn’t understand what friendship meant to you. Now I know and I’m sorry I couldn’t be a friend back”. That one had been tempting, it almost seemed like he was back to his senses…but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for the threats, and the words he’d spoken and not apologized for. So time went on, she missed him dearly and often thought of him. She stopped going to the chat rooms, but the nightingales were still in her head. She avoided listening to music, but she knew she was humming “Queen Bee” by Taj Mahal…and that he was listening to it wherever he was. Poetry didn’t mean much anymore, and even during her happy moments and her trip to visit other friends, she’d hear his voice in her head. Well, just his laughter. She had always liked how his eyes got full of mischief when he threw his head back and laughed at something. She doesn't know how, but one day she decided to go to twitter and look him up. Sure enough, he had a page and only one entry. The entry was dated a week after they parted ways and it read: "The nightingales sing through my head! The nightingales, the nightingales." Her heart broke. And that’s how things began a second time. Things that we are supposed to leave in the past, that almost killed us, should not be sought again. Sought she did. This time there was no one to blame but her.

Firing up the Yahoo Messenger one last time, she created a quick random screename and checked to see if any of his main 10 ID’s were online. One was. She sent a PM saying “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for what happened. I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’ll never bother you again.” He didn’t even ask who it was and quickly said: “I’m sorry too, I missed you. I’m sorry you have to go again but I respect that.” She apologized again, profusely. He apologized too, and asked her how she had been and he hoped she was happy. They talked back and forth, she felt her heart swell and burst that they could be friends again. She told him straightaway that she couldn’t go through the same thing again, that she almost died the first time around. He nodded, and said: “me too”. So they embarked on the second round of friendship, this time carefully side stepping anything that could be taken the wrong way. They again spent time on the phone, catching up and listening to music. This time the online interaction was minimal, since she had swore it off altogether. It seemed to be going okay, although she often caught him starting sentences and then saying “nevermind”, in a defeated voice. She’d ask him what was wrong, and the subject would be changed. All seemed well until one day she was telling him that she had started guitar classes. Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.

He said: “I bet he wants to fuck you.”, and giggled. She felt the rage tingling in her fingers and her voice vibrated as she spat back “Not everyone is you, some guys are actually capable of being friends and professionals.” He immediately went on a “this is all your doing, you know how I feel about you, why don’t you give me a chance” rant as she pinched the bridge of her nose. She quietly said she wasn’t doing this again and said good-bye. Deleted the fake screename and ignored the phone calls. This time he emailed almost immediately apologizing over and over for ruining things, for being out of line and not being a friend. He said he would leave her alone, he wasn’t going to torture her and pester her any longer. He kept to his word, and she saw that in fact he had changed. He knew that now his words and actions had consequences. She called him back and cleared up, demanded an apology, which he did right away. He knew she wasn’t the type of person that deserved any sort of lewd remark. This time their talks were strained, and short. She started making excuses to not call him, he didn’t seem to get angry as much as tired and sad. But even that didn’t last long. They were in the middle of a trivia game in an empty room at 4 a.m. when a newcomer came by and asked everyone’s name and location. The guy’s name was Robert and he was from GA, seemed like a nice kid, then again in the beginning they all do. She was weary about saying her information, but before she could say her name, she witness the first time the infamous chatter broke down publicly and said: “Well, thanks to the humanization of the [insert screename] that’s been going on, I am J and I’m from Minnesota.” She couldn’t believe he had actually come out and given anything about him. She quietly said her name, and Texas and spent a time wondering what just happened.

Alas, she would never know what bought it on. After Robert left the room, he started arguing about him being tired and not sleeping due to her. He was done with the abuse, to which she asked what was she doing to abuse him. He went on and on about her just not giving in to what he wanted…sigh. Again. She was tired too this time. She didn’t even wait for it to get her upset. She knew this was the end of him, for good. She said: “Ok, then I wont abuse you anymore. Whatever.” , logged off and turned him off her mind. This time she was not sad, or angry. It was indifference. She had tried.

Which brings us to “Little Boxes” ringing angrily into the night. It was over. He realized she wasn’t going to answer and emailed her: “You stupid bitch.” She felt the anger coming up and quickly pushed it away, he had no control over her. She deleted the email. Two days later, the last communication from him came through. The email’s subject was “Sad”. The body read: “I feel so sick. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me?” Again, she deleted. It’s always a game. It’s always mind control. In the beginning she had felt she did something wrong, by simply being a friend to someone everyone avoided in the chat room. Maybe they had it right. There was a point to people ignoring him…and now, so did she.

This story had to be written, because it needed a way out of me and to be buried into the past. You live, and hopefully, you learn. The nightingales will always be yours, J. I hope you find a way to silence them. I have.

He says to her what moves her most.
He would not name his soul within
Her hearing,—rather pays her cost
With praises to her lips and chin.
Man has but one soul, 'tis ordained,
And each soul but one love, I add;
Yet souls are damned and love's profaned.
These nightingales will sing me mad!
The nightingales, the nightingales.

-Bianca Among The Nightingales
by Elizabeth Barret Browning