Quoted By:
Some anonymous figure on /vt/ has apparently decided that borrowing my name my mannerisms and my entire digital shadow is a worthwhile hobby and I find myself in the strange position of having to explain to friends acquaintances and bewildered onlookers that no I am not the person posting bizarre threads at three in the morning and no the strange confessions and cryptic green text monologues are not secret windows into my soul but rather the creative writing exercises of someone who either has too much time or too little imagination and while I understand that the culture of anonymous boards thrives on masks and misdirection it becomes tiresome when the mask is stitched from my own face and paraded around like a carnival prop because impersonation online has a way of sticking like burrs to clothing and suddenly you are answering questions you never asked and defending statements you never made and clarifying personal details that were never up for public debate in the first place and among these clarifications is the oddly persistent rumor that I am gay which in itself would not be a scandal or a flaw or anything remotely worth dramatizing but it is inaccurate and the inaccuracy is the point because identity whether about orientation personality or preference belongs to the person living it and not to a bored trickster with a keyboard and an internet connection who thinks that nudging strangers into confusion is a substitute for meaning and so I say plainly that I am not gay not as an insult to anyone who is but as a simple factual correction in the same way I would correct someone who insisted I was born in a different country or had a pet iguana named Steven or secretly communicate only through semaphore flags because truth matters even in trivial corners of the web and especially when someone else is attempting to remix it into something unrecognizable and the strangest part of all this is how easily a fabricated persona can begin to echo louder than the real one as if repetition alone can will a fiction into solidity like tapping on a wall until it believes it is a drum and so I am left watching a papier mache version of myself wobble through threads and replies built from exaggerations half jokes and outright inventions while I remain here solid and unremarkable and distinctly uninterested in becoming a character in someone else’s improv routine and I imagine the impersonator hunched over a flickering screen convinced that each post is a clever stitch in a tapestry of irony not realizing that the tapestry looks more like a laundry line of mismatched socks fluttering in a wind made of recycled memes and lukewarm energy drinks and the narrative begins to fray because the more I attempt to explain the more absurd the situation feels as though I must draft affidavits to confirm that I do not spend weekends practicing interpretive dance in abandoned shopping malls or composing sonnets to household appliances or plotting elaborate coming out arcs for a life that does not contain them and soon the explanation loops back on itself like a dog chasing a rumor chasing its own tail until the tail becomes a hyperlink and the hyperlink becomes a paper airplane and the paper airplane becomes a philosophical debate about whether airplanes dream of being birds or birds dream of being usernames and somewhere in that spiraling carnival of misattributed posts and phantom declarations the original point still stands quietly waving a small factual flag that reads this is not me this has never been me and the truth does not bend simply because someone typed it loudly enough and yet the letters start to wobble and melt into alphabet soup and the soup begins composing symphonies about digital doppelgangers wearing novelty mustaches while tap dancing on the keyboard of destiny which is not even plugged in but insists it can still power the moon and the moon nods sagely because it too has been impersonated by a streetlamp with delusions of grandeur and the streetlamp is arguing with a hedgehog about broadband speeds and suddenly the whole matter dissolves into a parade of inflatable question marks marching through a pixelated desert chanting usernames that taste like static and I am still here ordinary unimpersonated in my own mind calmly stating once more before the parade drifts off into glittering nonsense that I am myself and not the echo and not the caricature and not the rumor folded into a paper crane and launched into the void where it flaps briefly and then transforms into a teapot reciting forum posts to a choir of bewildered cucumbers who never asked for any of this but applaud anyway because applause is just another kind of punctuation in a sentence that forgot how to end.
