When I first created Anthony, I did it online by signing up for a Protonmail account so that I could fuck around on the dark web mostly anonymously.

Not that I was doing anything explicit, I just loved (and still love) computers and the internet - and liked the feeling and the excitement of being on the dark web.

I’ve already told the story of how I met Tim, so I’ll keep it brief. We met on a dark web version of Omegle, and then both found out we were gay. We exchanged Protonmail emails, and messaged each other every so often from then on.

And then I started writing stories.

I’ve tried to find the first stories I wrote, but I deleted them along with my Medium account, and couldn’t find them anywhere on any archive or backup. But I started writing them in early 2018, when I first met the real version of Tyler.

And ever since then I’ve tried to publish stories around once a week, and I’ve recently had trouble doing that.

The stories are, of course, very loosely based off of what my reality actually is. I do use my experiences but most everything is just a fiction that I use to protect myself (and the people I write about), make my points on those issues more interesting, and to attempt to make a barrier between reality and the stories. I’ve broken that barrier again.

I guess it can be attributed to my recent isolation from my friends and whomever I currently have a crush on from school, or just Summer. But either way, I’ve broken the barrier, and I’ve kinda gone back to using the characters for reasons beyond what I’m supposed to.

Once in a while I actually look at my website, and then notice how weird the characters page is. There seems to be no use for it, because I still write all my stories as if the characters do not have a physical form of any kind. I created the page as another barrier to keep me knowing that the stories aren’t real. The characters I write about are not in any way their real life counterparts.

It’s almost like the fact that I need that is a story in itself.