Let's Not Meet Again

The Perils Of Online Roleplay

This happened when I was a young and impressionable 14, back in 2011/12, and was frequenting online chat sites for role-playing purposes. It was a bit of a bad habit, but as an introvert who didn't have many friends, it was how I did social interaction. I'll say for myself that even now I still have some of the friends I made back then. But let's not talk about them, let's talk about my friend Alex.

Alex was a guy that I met in a Doctor Who chatroom; he sent me a private message for something I had said in the room that I don't remember, and we struck up a conversation. I remember he had really good grammar and he typed paragraph-long messages. He told me that he was two years older than I was and lived on the West Coast, somewhere in California. At the time, I was living with my parents in North Carolina, so it was quite a considerable time difference. Yet he always seemed to have the time to talk to me.

As long-distance friendships often do, we sort of disintegrated. I could tell that he was making valid efforts to talk to me, but I just lost interest and found myself moving on after a few weeks of talking to him. One night he sent me what amounted to an essay's worth of messages describing his love for me, how he just knew that we were meant for each other, yadda yadda yadda. It was completely out of the blue, so I politely rejected him and ended our correspondence. He would continue to send me paragraphs of text every night, talking about our love and how perfect I was, blah blah blah. I eventually blocked him.

Fast-forward a couple of months to early 2013. I wasn't role-playing anymore, and it was the second month of my first serious relationship. One night my phone buzzed with a text message from an unknown number. The owner of said number was apparently looking for a friend of his. I informed him that he had messaged the wrong number, laughed it off, and then we texted off-and-on for the rest of the evening.

Dude seemed pretty nice, and he said he was pleased to have made friends with a supposed wrong number. I concurred. (Still kicking myself for that). As we talked over the next few days I found myself telling him about Alex: what had happened, how uncomfortable it made me, how relieved I was to have found someone else and be in a happy relationship. My new friend was unresponsive for a couple of hours; I just figured I had annoyed him with my sob story and wrote it off. I was woken up from sleep by my phone practically exploding with new notifications from my friend.

It was Alex. He had changed his number just so he could text me and pretend to be a stranger who had the wrong number. He said that he still loved me, that I was a dumb slut for moving on from him, and that I had to break up with my boyfriend and "rekindle our flame" or I would be sorry. Yikes. I blocked him and didn't tell my boyfriend anything.

More months passed and I eventually forgot about Alex. I would still get occasional messages from unknown numbers saying innocuous things like "hey" and "what's up"; I blocked it every time. I wasn't taking any risks from someone I didn't know. It wasn't until I was 16 that shit finally hit the fan.

At this point I had changed phones and numbers. I was facetiming my boyfriend (same one from before), when I got yet another text from an unknown number. But this one was different. It just said, "I'm here." I had no doubt that it was Alex. I said my goodnights to my boyfriend and ended the call before doing the stupidest thing I could have done: I answered the text.

"Who is this?" I played dumb, and he saw right through it. He responded with, "It's me, baby. It's Alex. I always talked about the two of us being together, and now we finally can be. I love you so much." I wanted to throw up. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

"I'm in Raleigh. I moved out and drove to find you. Tell me where you are and I can come pick you up. We can get a place and finally be together."

(Raleigh is the capital city of North Carolina, I live several hours away from it. Luckily enough, he didn't know this.)

I was two steps away from panicking. Looking back on it, he could have been lying, but at the time I was just so terrified that I couldn't think straight. I told him to fuck off, that he was crazy, blah blah blah. He got pissed. "What are you talking about, honey? Why are you doing this? I came all this way just so I could be with you and you're going to push me away? Don't be such a selfish bitch and just tell me where you are."

I didn't reply. Instead I blocked the number, turned off my phone's location services, and didn't sleep.

Unbelievably, I never heard from him again. I don't know what could have happened to him, and I have no idea how he got my number after I changed it. He came across my Facebook feed early this year, and his page said that he had moved to Atlanta and had a girlfriend now.

I hope she's okay.