I think it's probably my discovery and use of Chaturbate that sparked me to think about the following incident from my past, even though the two things are not obviously connected. I think it's probably because Chaturbate is the first time I've used an internet chat room in maybe ten years; it got me thinking about the nuances of interacting with people in that way, and it took me back to a time prior to facebook and twitter, to the days before 'social networking' was actually a thing, to when my internet interaction with other people was primarily in chat rooms, and how people can turn out to be very different to how you initially imagine them to be.
Well, one person in particular is who I am thinking about.
It was the early noughties and I didn't own a computer but I accessed the internet regularly in an internet café. I lived in a large city and the internet café was open 24hrs, and I would frequently kill several hours there between doing other things. I was interested in films and books, so those were the chat rooms and forums I looked at and participated in the most, and very quickly I felt part of a network of people who were sharing ideas and opinions and recommendations with each other. Now, over a decade later, the internet is part of the fabric of all our lives, part of the air that we breath, but back then, it was my first time discovering the possibilities it offered, of being able to communicate with so many like-minded people, and it felt truly exhilarating and exciting.
In amongst this network of people I was communicating with online was a particular woman, whom for the purposes of this post I'll call Melanie. I don't recall where or how we met exactly, but it would have been in a chat room or forum dedicated to film or book talk. From there we must have exchanged email addresses, or perhaps our email addresses were on an internet profile, I don't recall, but one way or another we started an email correspondence - very much grounded in talk about movies and books; things we'd seen or read, what we liked or didn't like; and from what I recall, it was a very stimulating and interesting correspondence - certainly for me it was.
This is what you need to know about me at the time: I wasn't looking for a girlfriend. I was kind of in the middle of an on/off relationship, and even had I not been, I still wouldn't have been looking for a girlfriend online. I lived in a large, vibrant city, and had I been looking for a girlfriend, an internet café would have been the last place I'd have been looking. However, I also wasn't averse to meeting up in person with someone I'd met online - it's just that that wasn't my motivation at all. I was genuinely just looking for interesting people to correspond with and chat with online. That was it.
Melanie was in her mid 20s and was a school teacher - teaching 11-16yr olds. She was intelligent and articulate, and we shared similar tastes. We would chat frequently online and it became increasingly common for me to find emails from her in my inbox - giving her opinion on an obscure author I'd mentioned or telling me about a film she'd seen. Her emails always seemed very well thought out, well written, intelligent. The whole nature of our correspondence was quite cerebral and intellectual.
This went on for maybe several weeks, and it did reach a point for me where I started to think that it maybe would be a good thing to meet her in real life, as an extension of our online friendship. I had been careful about giving out personal information to people online, but with Melanie I had no worries at all - she was so bright, educated, articulate, and a schoolteacher; not for one second did I have any concerns about her at all.
Then one day I received an email from her that was a little different to usual, in that she had attached to it a collection of photographs of herself - nothing sexual or provocative, just general photos of her at home, her with her pet cat, being out and about with friends - just general everyday pictures.
There was nothing inherently odd about this, but I remember thinking that it felt a little jarring given the context of our online communication up to that point. But I am naïve and I am an ass at the best of times, and I dismissed my uneasy feelings and told myself that she was just 'being friendly'.
I responded to her email with some vaguely polite comments about her pictures, and I thought nothing more of it. I expected our online correspondence to continue as normal, and like I said, I was considering suggesting that we meet up in real life. (We lived in different cities, but still relatively close to each other, so meeting in person would not have been a difficult thing to organise.)
But if the email that contained the photo attachments felt a little jarring, it was nothing compared to what came next. What came next was truly disturbing.
A few days after the email with the photos, I received a new email from her, and so disturbing was this email that even thinking about it now sends chills through me. Just thinking about it transports me back to that time. I can see the internet café around me; I can even smell the place, the sour, stale human-sweat-attempting-to-be-masked-by-deodorant odour that it had. I can see the multi-coloured blur of the city passing by outside. I can feel my blood turn to ice as I read the words on the screen in front of me.
She'd sent me a long email. I printed it out and it ran to two full sides of A4 paper. And while the content of it was disturbing enough, the way it was written was also disturbing. Had I not known better, I wouldn't have believed it was written by the same person with whom I'd been corresponding for all those weeks. Her previous emails had all been well-written, intelligent, eloquent, but this one was totally different. It was written in short, clipped sentences, some of which barely made any sense. It was fragmentary, unhinged, the product of someone who was, for whatever reason, truly disturbed.
The crux of it was that she loved me, and she wanted to know when I was going to declare my love for her? She talked a lot about me 'testing' her - that my communication with her had been a 'test' of her love for me, and she wanted me to know that she had passed my tests. She spoke a lot about me playing a 'game' with her, and when was I going to stop playing the game and realise that she loved me?
She believed that I was communicating with her in various secret ways. She believed that voices she heard on the radio were me, sending her secret, coded messages. She believed that I was communicating with her via the positioning of inanimate objects in her house. She believed that I was adopting different identities in internet chat rooms and talking to her using these alternate identities as a test of her love for me. She wanted me to know that she had passed all of these tests, and when was I going to stop playing the game and realise that we were meant to be together?
She painted a picture of our lives together ahead of us, as a blissfully happy couple deeply in love. And if she couldn't have that then she said she would kill me - that she would come to meet me armed with a knife, and that if the meeting did not go well then she would stab me to death, and following that she would kill herself. 'A bloody end for both of us,' is I believe how she put it.
I read this email in a state of total shock and disbelief, frozen to the spot. I was truly horrified and terrified by it. I immediately started to try to think of what exactly she knew about me, what personal information I had told her. She knew what I looked like, approximately where I lived, the places I frequented. She knew enough about me and my life to make me feel very, very scared.
I printed out a copy of the email (I no longer have it, or else I would quote directly from it, and the email account I used back then has long since died). I wanted a copy as some form of insurance. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know whether to go to the police. I didn't know how seriously to take the threat. I think in hindsight, perhaps I should've reported it to the police - primarily because it may have led to Melanie receiving help, which she undoubtedly needed. But I didn't go to the police, I didn't do anything.
I did show the email to various friends - some of whom, alarmingly, found it funny. There I was, terrified, and they were laughing! But I wanted to warn people to be on the look out for anything or anyone strange, to not give out any information about me to anyone they didn't know.
I never responded to the email. Had I been the person then that I am now, I would've responded, just once. I'd have made it clear that it was my final correspondence, that I didn't love her, that I wasn't 'testing' her, that there was no 'game', and I'd have tried to sympathetically encourage her to seek help. But I didn't do that. I was young. And I was truly terrified, and I didn't know what to do, how to act.
Nothing came of it, and I never heard from her again - although I think I possibly deleted that email account after receiving her email so that she couldn't communicate with me any more.
But the effects of the email stayed with me for weeks. When I left the house I would scan the street outside to check that she wasn't there. When I was out in the city I would find myself looking over my shoulder every few seconds, to check that I wasn't being followed. If a car slowed down beside me I would immediately recoil, and my eyes would nervously look for who was driving it. A man or woman? Could it be her? For weeks, I was a nervous, jumpy, paranoid mess.
So that's Melanie - the first person with whom I ever developed an online friendship. And that's how it turned out, with her threatening to kill me. It was a salutary lesson in the dangers of meeting people online, and while I firmly believe that most people are good and decent, and are what they appear to be, it's also worth remembering that sometimes people are not what they appear to be. Melanie certainly wasn't.
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