This piece was originally published by Forever Mag, but was removed after readers complained about a word in the piece. (See if you can guess which one.)

Internet Boyfriend

One of the dumbest symptoms of my months-long psychosis was that I fell in love with almost every guy who crossed my path. I fell in love with this random black guy I met by the Chelsea Pier, for example, who asked me to marry him and then brought me back to his apartment in the Bronx and robbed me. It was humiliating. The only thing I could give him was two dollars and a food stamp card, which made the whole thing even more pathetic. I fell in love with this other guy, too, a meth dealer named Nicky who lived in an AIDS SRO in Alphabet City. Nicky had a neon pink mohawk and a big, ugly, club-like cock. He made videos of us shooting up and fucking to put on his Xtube. They’re probably still on there, but I can’t figure out how to find them. He’s probably dead now anyway, or in jail. Oh well. C’est la vie!

By far my most stable love affair during this period was with my internet boyfriend. His name was Thijs. He was twenty one years old and lived in Amsterdam. He was very tall and very skinny. He told me he was six foot six, but I think he was even taller. I saw a video of him once where he looked like a giant, eight feet or more. He towered over the other people in the video. They were all girls, but still. “Everyone in the Netherlands is like that,” he told me. He was very self conscious about his size. In the photos he sent he would pretzel his limbs around his torso, wrapping his ankles around his neck. He wanted to make himself seem smaller I guess, but it actually had the opposite effect. It made him look infinite, like an optical illusion, or like one of those snakes that’s eating its own tail.

human.with.wings: 	if we don’t learn to sleep with one eye open like birds i will break	
			up

manticorboi: 		i dont care
			stop acting like child

How did we “meet?” It was funny. I had so much energy that summer it was sick. Sometimes I would walk for ten hours at a time and not get tired. I walked from Queens into Manhattan and then north to the Bronx. I walked to the Chelsea Pier, and down to the new World Trade Center. I must have walked the whole length of Manhattan a few dozen times that summer. The only way I could make myself calm down was by listening to those sleep hypnosis meditations they have on YouTube. Those things saved my life. The hypnotist I liked best was named Joe Tracy. He had a smooth, relaxing voice. I loved his visualizations. He really took you on a journey. There was a purpose to each hypnosis, too. Each video had its own objective. You could choose to meet your spirit guide, for example, or find your higher self. One night I came across a video titled “Meet Your Twin Flame.” Twin flame, I thought. The phrase felt right. Yes, I thought. I am ready for this experience. I put my earbuds in and laid back, resting my head on a pile of woodchips. I was in the woods in Central Park, lying beneath a tree. That’s where I usually slept. Either that, or in the bushes by the water. I liked to sleep against the Earth. I liked how the planet cradled me, how it pressed its lullaby against my skin. I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to sleep in a cramped, stuffy, apartment when the whole wide world was right outside. When you could sleep in the grass, beneath the big open sky. The world of humans seemed upside down. They were idiots. They were the crazy ones, not me.

I pressed play on the video, then closed my eyes. Soft music began to pipe through my ear buds. Then Joe Tracy spoke.

“Hi, this is Joe Tracy,” he said. “Welcome to this guided meditation.”

Joe told me to picture myself in a canoe. I was floating down a river, paddling gently with the current.

“Look to your left, then to your right,” said Joe. “Look at the banks of the river. What do you see?”

I saw beautiful trees, with leaves of every color. Pine needles blanketing the soft forest floor. There were animals rummaging about in the roughage, snacking on mushrooms and bugs. The sky was a deep, watery purple. All was perfect, peaceable, serene.

“There in the water,” said Joe, “You see it. Ahead of you: your island.”

He instructed me to paddle up to the island, then leave my canoe on the bank and step forward along a stone path. I looked down at my bare feet as I walked, at the grass poking out from between the stones in the path.

“At the end of the path you’ll find a brick of marble,” said Joe, “along with a set of tools. Use the tools to carve out the marble. There, your twin flame is waiting to emerge.”

I chipped away at my brick. The marble was cool and soft. Pieces flecked away like butter. Eventually a face appeared, then a shoulder. Soon a torso was visible. I took a step back to admire my creation. It looked exactly like Frank Ocean.

I always knew it would be him, I thought as I drifted off to sleep.

The next day I had a new follower on Instagram. It was not Frank Ocean. It was Thijs. User name @manticorboi. I scrolled through his photos. There was one of him petting a baby deer in a park. Another where he was sitting in lotus position, eyes closed, pretending to meditate. He looked kind of like a salamander. Serene and sweet. I guess that’s him, I thought. My twin flame. I sent him a message. He responded right away.

human.with.wings: 	hi
			i think u are my soulmate
			will u have my babies

manticorboi: 		well
			if i am going to have your children u should know
			i have a very particular scent
			that only some people like

I didn’t care what he smelled like. He probably smelled great. I wanted a boy who smelled like sweat and dirt. Who reminded me what it was like to be buried in the Earth. To be dead and rotting. To be one with the fungus. We hit it off immediately. He sent me photos of himself without a shirt, wearing his underwear on his head.

manticorboi: 		this is my hat
			do you like it?

human.with.wings: 	yes
			i am a virus
			do u love me?

In some ways, an internet boyfriend is the best kind of boyfriend there is. You can leave him on in the background while you’re doing other things. You can read or write or draw pictures or vape. He takes up no space. He satisfies your longing for companionship without being obnoxious or obtrusive. If he does become obtrusive, you can simply close your laptop. If you really get sick of him, you can just delete him altogether. Best of all, he can’t take you to his apartment in the Bronx and steal your food stamps. He can’t shoot poison in your body and make videos of it to post online. I thought Thijs was an angel. He wasn’t, not at all, but that was my idea of him. It’s easier to maintain your ideas about someone if they only exist online. Easier to keep the fantasy alive. The more time you spend with someone IRL, the less they come to resemble the idealized version of themself that lives in your head. And the more that happens, the more they disappoint you.

manticorboi: 		me: i’m shy
			also me: sucks 2 nigger dicks

human.with.wings: 	omfg
			why would u say that
			ppl in ur country are so racist

manticorboi: 		actually it is only me who is like that
			besides, why would i suck their dicks if i was racist?

He said stuff like that all the time. I don’t think he actually hated anyone. He just liked to say shocking things for attention. He wanted to be a provocateur, like his hero, Milo Yiannopolous. I didn’t care. He was one of the only people who would talk to me at all. Most of my old friends abandoned me when I went nuts. My “cool” New York friends were embarrassed by my insanity. All my trans “sisters” disappeared when I stopped being trans. Thijs was not turned off by my psychosis. In fact he seemed to enjoy it. He made a point of telling me his ex had been addicted to GHB. That when they were together he’d been sixteen while the boyfriend was twenty-five.

manticorboi: 		when i come to new york will we do drugs?

human.with.wings: 	no
			drugs are bad

manticorboi: 		please
			just once

human.with.wings: 	ugh
			okay
			fine
			just once

He came up with a plan to get to New York. He would accept a plane ticket from his other internet boyfriend, who was a famous drag queen. The drag queen was going to be in Provincetown for the summer. She had a residency at a theatre there. Thijs would fly to Boston, then make up some excuse to get away from the drag queen and take a bus to New York, where we would meet up. We would stay in a hotel and do drugs and be bad. Everything would be perfect. We fantasized about the trip for weeks. Of course it never happened. A few weeks before he was supposed to come, Thijs canceled the trip.

manticorboi: 		i felt like prostitute
			because jerick paid

human.with.wings: 	sad :(
			but i understand
			btw - how many other internet boyfriends do u have?
			j/w

Things remained okay between us until my insanity wore off. Then Thijs got sick of me. He didn’t like that I was sober. It was much less interesting and fun. He liked it when I OD’d. He liked when I was in the hospital. I thought he was so immature. Here I was, getting clean and fixing up my life. And somehow that was a turn-off.

I realized that to him, I had been the bad boy. The fucked up older man who rode the edge. It didn’t match my self-perception, but there it was. His idea of me. His fantasy. And I was ruining it. I thought about all the bad boys I had dated. Would I have stuck by them if they’d stopped being bad? Probably not. It wasn’t even the boys themselves that I liked. It was the badness. The demons on their backs. It was the same way for Thijs. When I shook my demons off, he lost interest. He found a real boyfriend in Amsterdam and stopped messaging me. I was devastated.

human.with.wings:	:(
			why dont u love me anymore
			whats so great about him

manticorboi: 		idk 
			he’s not even handsome
			but i just like him
			because he is nice to me	

When I read his message my sadness transformed to rage. White lightning flashed in the front part of my brain. I copied and pasted the messages and sent them to the new boyfriend. The two of them both blocked me. And that was that.

Recently I went to a psychic who told me my heart chakra was fucked up. She said I had to let myself be vulnerable if I wanted to find love. She said she could tell I’d been hurt, but that I had to let go. I had to let go of the people who hurt me, and let myself be loved again.