In the beginning...

There was a 17 year old Australian girl who was trying hard to be a woman, dating a paedophile we’ll call “V”. 8000 miles away, across the ocean, there was a sweet innocent Canadian boy who couldn’t get a date... She had moved out of home at 15 and was living with “V”, his de facto wife and older daughter, practicing Wicca in secret as the wife had forbade her to keep her religion. She had lost her job and dropped out of school for him and spent most of her time online or playing computer games. She was at odds (but still in contact) with her family who were against her generationally different relationship for reasons she couldn’t see at the time, and had lost all her friends from high school for the same reason. Meanwhile, he lived at home with his parents, went to high school, had a close circle of friends he’d known for most of his life and was going through all things typical to a boy of his age group. He was shy, emotional and somewhat of an ugly duckling...

At that time I spent a lot of my time at Mysticwicks.com, an online forum for religious discussion... I helped and guided those who were new to paganism and listened to people’s problems, because, well, you know everything when you’re a teenager and I had to share that wisdom. One of the people I had begun to help was Obi. He was interested in Wicca, but too practical to suspend his disbelief long enough to have a good shot at it. We added each other to msn and then forgot about each other for months, until one day his msn name was “Whoever doesn’t talk to me today will be deleted from my contact list.” I didn’t remember who he was where we met, or even his gender but I didn’t want to be deleted, so I made the effort to talk to him; soon, we were talking all day, every day.

Time passed, we got to know each other, and I knew I liked him. There was nothing I enjoyed more than talking online to him, emailing, playing games of 20 questions, and cybering. It wasn’t a secret that my sex life was bad, hell, the whole relationship was pretty bad. I remember telling him about it and he said something that stuck with me for years. He told me the mental picture he got of my situation were two women, one a young girl, the other older, serving a fat dirty pig of a man in an armchair while he ate and ordered us around. I couldn’t fully deny it either. But in a very short amount of time I learnt I could get from Obi a lot of things I wasn’t getting in real life, and that helped me stay in the relationship with “V”.
Soon, Obi’s 18th Birthday was coming up. In Australia, that’s a big event, and I didn’t yet know the legal drinking etc age is 19 in Canada... so I wanted to give him something. I’d managed to get onto unemployment benefits, and was somehow smart enough not to turn the money over to “V” who was a magnet for debt. I searched everywhere for the perfect thing, and was so nervous!
That’s when we swapped addresses, and I gave him my real name. Being in a relationship and being afraid of giving details to people over the net, I gave him my sister’s P.O Box number instead.
I ended up sending a necklace and a small box of chocolate, I believe with a raunchy letter, but I can’t be sure. Neither of us dated anything in the very beginning ><
Things progressed unchecked, I confessed that I “Liked him far more than I should” and by Christmas that year we were in love, completely smitten. It only got worse.
He wrote me poetry and sent me well thought-out gifts, things I still treasure. We role played, and wrote stories, and told each other our darkest fantasies and deepest secrets.
I was honest enough by Christmas to tell “V” I had a pen friend, and he knew I role-played and cybered online but wasn’t threatened by that. He was too busy watching porn most days to care really. But our relationship was still rocky and painful. It got worse when my grandfather died. That night my mum put her own feelings aside and called “V” to come to the hospital and comfort me, and invited me to take part in family things. But still he refused to attend the funeral with me and the strain of always having his ex there, feeling like I was sharing him took a great toll.

A week after my grandfather died I found out both my sister and mum had cancer. It was crushing. On top of that, my sister had a car accident and was pretty badly injured. My mum was staying a lot at my sister’s place to help her out while she healed up and got treatment, and then mum started treatment too. She was in a lot more danger than my sister, but she was determined to live. She said us girls were too young to become orphans, and looked all over for a doctor who cared enough to save her. She managed to find one, and underwent several painful tests to learn if even he could help her. The waiting was always terrible. My sister recovered, probably because she had officially become the head of the family when grandfather died – she was the strongest and most capable member of our immediate family, and she stepped up to the plate to take care of mum. Mum had surgery and was hospitalised three hours away from our home town. We both spent a lot of time commuting to visit her every day that we could. “V” never came with me, not once. But I had bigger things on my mind than my own relationships.