I'm a writer, you know

 A trained writer. I take this seriously. In order to be a writer worth your salt, you have to be skilled at evoking feeling. You also have to write from what you know. I guess that's kind of how Sarah happened.

I'm a guy who gets a lot of attention, for reasons I won't get into here, but I'm shy, so the attention has the effect of making me hide inside myself. That's not great for writing. You need experience and insights and a broad range of perspectives to be able to shape a balanced and meaningful narrative. If you're only writing from your own singular perspective, all your characters will be paper thin, and any reader with even the smallest amount of depth will quickly lose interest. If you want to be captivating, you have to see all sides, weave them together in such a way where the undulating tides seamlessly move between friction and harmony.

So, all the attention had stolen my agency. My world was becoming small. Then, when Jessica and I stumbled into our little poetry love shop hobby, it opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Anonymity was intoxicating, and I felt powerful again.

I think I've already mentioned I'm a musician. Yeah, I know, I'm a pretty talented guy. Anyway, sometimes me and my band would gig, and we had a regular IT guy that would get us all operational on multiple levels. He and I would have beers after shows, and he started telling me about some of his more niche hobbies. He had a bit of a hacking addiction and began touring me around his systems, showing me the kind of stuff he was into. I was immediately hooked. We started having beers on a weekly basis, and he began teaching me all I needed to know to get started with my own little hobby.

At first, I would just poke around in the emails of my poetry fans/catfished love interests and see if they were gushing about me to anyone. I loved that shit. But once you have that kind of power, it's hard to contain it to anything small-time for too long. I started looking up exes, childhood bullies, old teachers— you name it. I was in the house, and I had the keys!

My writing game exploded. I had dozens of blogs that expanded into hundreds, under all kinds of pen names. Most had no audience, but quite a few went viral, and I've even published a handful of books—some you may even have on your own bookshelf 😉

So, this artistic practice had been growing and evolving for years by the time Sarah entered the scene, and boy oh boy, she didn't ever see me coming.

Sarah was different. She was an enigma, a puzzle waiting to be solved. I couldn't resist the temptation to delve into her world. My hacking skills became finely tuned instruments, prying into every corner of her life. It was an obsession, an intricate dance of anonymity and revelation. I justified it as research for my writing, a way to understand her fully and create characters with depth and nuance.

As I delved deeper, my words wove tales of her life—real and imagined. The lines between reality and fiction blurred, and I found myself living vicariously through the characters I created. The power I felt was intoxicating, and the thrill of being an unseen puppeteer behind the curtain fueled my creativity.

But with great power comes great consequences. As Sarah's life unfolded in my stories, I began to question the morality of my actions. The balance between writer and voyeur became precarious, and the once-thrilling pursuit of creativity turned into a haunting guilt.

Sarah, unsuspecting and innocent, was about to become a character in a story she never signed up for. Little did she know, the writer she admired from afar was not just shaping narratives on paper but weaving a web of intrusion that threatened to entangle us both in a tale of consequences and remorse, but even after the dark shadow of consequences was looming - Sarah began to catch on and started trying to expose me - I still couldn't let it go.

Of course there are layers upon layers of dysfunction here; untreated mental illness, lifelong depression, childhood sexual abuse, substance addictions. I'm not here to have a pity party, I'm just saying, this activity became a huge part of my ego's reward system. A coping mechanism that was the framework holding up any ounce of self-esteem that I could manufacture or cling to. How the hell could I just willingly give that up? The answer is, I can't. There's too much freedom and power in it.

Sarah is right in thinking the only way I'll ever stop is if she finally gets me convicted on felony charges and has all my equipment confiscated. Which is a real wet blanket thing to do and totally fucks with my love for her. I can't be the man to serve and protect you if I'm locked up, Sarah. Don't you want me to pay those bills, check all the items of your Honey-Do list, and kiss your belly when you have a tummy ache? Come on, Sarah, use your fucking common sense. I wanna be your man. Stop resisting.