The Second Xanatos in 2014

When I started writing Xanatos, in OD, I was a fifteen year old freshman. It was Spring, and, though I didn't know it, it was my last year at the private, Christian, school that I'd hated for six long years. Sometime that Spring, I found out that one of the only male friends I had was going to be moving. I don't remember if I started before or after then. It would have been a good thing to have written.
There are many things I wish I had written. I started writing because I wanted to lament my hopeless infatuation with a girl whom I called Ami. She had been a classmate of mine. We'd met in Sunday school kindergarten when she broke up my budding romance (we were even engaged!) with the first Courtney. Courtney and I even drew a picture of ourselves getting married on the back of the piece of paper with gemstones on it that I carried with me. However, due to Ami, we crossed it out. In third grade, when I went to the church's school, I became friends with Ami. At the end of that year, she left. I still remember catching cottonwood fibers flying through the air, making wishes on each one that she might be allowed to stay. The three of us did that, Ami, the first Courtney, and me. Ami was a link to the past, back to some of my earliest memories even at fifteen. Even the diary description was looking backwards. "Things were fine for a while. Now they aren't. I hope they get better. Until then, I'll write," or something like that.

I hated the school. I was at the absolute bottom of the very specific social system that they'd built there. My few friends were girls, and we couldn't see each other very often. Firstly, because at private schools, everybody lives far away from everybody. Secondly, because I was a boy, and everybody knows that boys and girls being near each other is dangerous. I was thirteen when I first seriously started considering suicide. It was the internet that first gave me an outlet from my miserable real world. It was the friendships formed online that sustained me and kept me from doing something stupid.

I don't remember when Ami and I got back in touch. I know it was our friend Courtney who reintroduced us online. I quickly fell head over heels for her. I suppose that it was an easy thing to do back then. With family problems galore, and a staggering social ineptitude worsened by the fact that you don't get second chances at small schools, I was a ball of problems and my real life friends were tired of hearing about it. Ami was different, for a while anyway. She listened. She cared. She became my friend. She introduced me to her friends. And I fell. Hard. I used to describe my life as pre and post Ami. Well, that was a lot easier at eighteen when thirteen wasn't all that far away. She seemed to me in many ways to be the seminal event in my life, and seemed that way for quite some time. She was something new, something connected to this new life online, but she connected me to some ideal past. Some time where I was good. There was always some time I was good. There was always some time I was better. But it's always been just a little bit before whenever I was thinking about it. Ami brought it all together. To lament her, I started the first Xanatos.

The summer after I started Xanatos, as it turns out, would be critical in my life. It was when my friendship with Kat took off, and when Courtney and I fell for each other. Our computer was out of commission for whatever reason, and, after working long hot hours in my Gundam Wing inspired rose garden, I'd go downstairs to my brother's iMac and toss off e-mails and OD entries.

By this time, I'd pretty well established myself online. The people I generally talked to the most were Ami, Kat, Courtney, and a girl who wrote under the name of Ashiko. Of these four people, I'd met one. Kat was a friend of Ami's. Ashiko was an author I'd found on a Gundam Wing fan fiction site, and Courtney was the product of an AIM profile search for Sailor Moon, Star Wars, and Jesus. My whole world was turning into this internet world, and I loved it. I loved the escape from reality that the internet brought. I loved the freedom. I loved being able to be judged by what I then presumed to be my real self. I was a disembodied series of words, and this was in the days when I had faith in those. Online, I was a towering intellect, a successful fan fiction editor, and a spewer of gilded crap whose glitter would take a few years for me to unwrap. In reality, I was chubby and fifteen. Desperately awkward. So disliked for so many years that I'd been able to find solace only in my own sense of intellectual superiority. Obviously this made me even less liked. Nobody likes to hear how dumb they are. Least of all from a chubby fifteen year old. I found it amusing that at my private school, when a popular girl befriended me (almost exclusively online) her friends accused her of just trying to save herself when I shot up the school. It didn't occur to them to try to be nice to me. Not that I was a saint myself (which took a few more years to figure out).

When I started at my public school, I was more alone than ever. I didn't even have my old semi friends. The internet was my saint, savior, and salvation. I'd use the otherwise useless computers in each classroom from time to time to send messages. Then, something remarkable happened. I made a friend. Joel had been a dear friend of mine when we were children. Sometime when we were in our early tweens, something went wrong. Namely he decided he disliked me so he could insult me in front of other people. Almost certainly to deflect them from doing the same to him. We became close friends that year. During the boring, frustrating, and ego smashing production that was Brigadoon, we became closer than I'd been with a guy in years. He showed me webcomics. Megatokyo opened a world of entertainment to me that I'd never before considered. He also lived near by, so I could have a friend over to my house. A year older, he had a car, and he could drive.

My real life had begun.

And what of my digital life?

It continued. November first, Courtney and I confessed feelings, and had I been a slower typist, Kat would have confessed her feelings for me. Oh November first. Ashiko and I drifted apart. Ami and I drifted apart. I wrote about it in the diary, but it wasn't nearly as important. I had friends now. I had a real life. Joel, Tris, and I soon formed our trio. That would continue to be the relationship that would define my life for the next five years.

Time went on. I cheated on Courtney with a random pretty girl at a party, setting a precedent that would hold up for most of my subsequent relationships. I met Lee, and she kept offering her body to me. It was harder and harder to live online. I discovered porn, and discovered what to do with it. A particularly graphic metaphor from Ragtime suddenly made a great deal more sense to me. Thank goodness for AP History. I could no longer define myself by my prudery. Being a prude is plenty easy for a chubby awkward kid whom everybody hates. It's harder when you're a (still chubby) popular kid with great social skills (which he stole from the people around him). Suddenly, I was even more removed from the lofty person that I had convinced myself (and my internet friends) I was. So, I started calling myself by two names to try to justify this dichotomy.

Real life eventually overtook the internet, and another precedent was set. Upset over my emotional desire for Kat, and my physical desire for Lee, Courtney misread a diary entry in Xanatos about a dream I'd had about a girl (who wasn't Lee) and broke up with me. After initial problems, I coaxed Courtney into a process where we were going to get back together probably. In the meantime, I was enjoying my time with Lee. Summer school was right by her house, and her parents worked, so we had time alone together. In retrospect, she was REALLY trying to have sex with me. She'd shower. She'd show herself off in a towel. I never went for it. I did give her back rubs, though. A back rub without a shirt was the final straw for Courtney. I'd given her my password somehow, for some reason, at some time, and she was reading all of my e-mails. That settled it. Well, with her as a total, "no," I set my sights on Kat and my body on Lee. Eventually, I felt empty. At the time, I felt it was due to emotional issues. Now I realize I was probably bored due to a Summer away from friends, a novelty in my life before this point. So, I tried to see if I could go to Pennesic with Kat. That didn't work. So, I decided what I really needed was to pursue Courtney. And I tried. And I failed, though I did get a few pleasant makeouts out of my journey. Not worth the $300, though. Especially when you factor in inflation. Take that, Chan.

And so I pined for Courtney.

And now, I had two lives. The physical, real, life, with Lee, and with friends, and with all these wonderful things, and the internet life, which was a new kind of sanctuary. It was a sanctuary where I could go to indulge in the sadness and misery that used to be a part of my real life. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have done that before. When the gods wish to punish us, they give us what we want. I suppose the quote really is, "Those whom the gods with to punish, they first drive mad." I think it's the same basic idea, really.

So, life continued.

My real life kept, in many ways, getting better. I had a series of flings and girlfriends, I had decent grades, I went to college. My senior year I got involved with my first serious (titled) girlfriend, Amanda. During that time, I gradually shed all of my morals and inhibitions save for one last one which remains to this day. My life, in 2009, could not have been farther from my life in 2001 if I'd have planned it that way.

And maybe that was the problem with old Xanatos.

Like Tolstoy, I made potential girlfriends read the entirety of it so they could get a "true" sense of me. I was hesitant to write realities in it. I'd avoid things that had gradually taken over my life. My various "failings" as I called them were too serious, too bad, too removed from the me of 2001 to taint the purity that I projected on the place. Xanatos was a place to talk about beautiful notions like death, and time, and love, and loss, and flowers, and whatever else happened to be my metaphor de jure. But it wasn't where I could deal with the problems in my life. I couldn't talk about how hard it was for me to hold onto a faith that required me to give up my obsession with women. It wasn't where I could struggle with what many may call an addiction to pornography. It wasn't where I could handle the real and mature questions that were arising from my daily life, and from my daily struggles. And so I wrote less. And less. And less. I wrote this when I needed to write more and more and more. As I lost answers, as the questions that had no answers began to dominate my life, I found myself devoid of a place to explore them because of the history. Because of a connection to a sainted past, which was never altogether that sainted, I was suffering and struggling in the very real present. Xanatos became a place to try to keep in touch with one friend who had stayed relevant and a world that had long since ceased to be. Every entry was judged not by my only actual reader, but by the countless manifestations of all of the people who had seen it over the years. Every entry was judged by Ami, by Courtney, by Kat, by Amanda, by Amber, by Niki, by Ashiko, even by the people who had signed my diary and then forgotten about me. I would give nearly any quantity of money to know just who was "PainedPixie". A simple note that she left changed my very conception of the notion of love. But she likely has forgotten that there ever was a diary called Xanatos. Or a man who wished, so desperately wished, to be so called.

So what does that mean for ProseBox?

Well, I'm writing. Already I've written more in ProseBox in the last month than I'd written in OD for probably two years. Maybe more. This entry is, in many ways, trying to explore, and explain, just why that is. This idea may be wrong. This idea may be entirely faulty, may be illogical, may even be stupid. Well, that's fine. It's ProseBox. I'm allowed to be a loser here.

And that's what, for year, I didn't realize I really needed.