And just so I can keep from fully going insane, that person is not Jonah?
This time, the response came quickly.
No.
There are TV shows about people like me. That was the thought that bubbled up. I had watched these shows, the ones where people think they’re in love with a gorgeous woman and it turns out to be an obese insurance manager in the suburbs of Cleveland. But I had actually met Jonah! I had gotten contact information directly from him.
Was I ever talking to Jonah?
A question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered.
Yes.
When?
In the beginning.
The first couple months.
Then I was always talking to you?
Yes.
The first stirrings of anger arrived then.
Has it occurred to you that this is unspeakably fucked up?
No response.
And that you’ve been reading messages I wrote for someone else. And some I never intended anyone to read. Private accounts of my own grief.
I couldn’t stop typing.
And that you have been involved in the cruelest kind of trick imaginable for months of your life? Has it occurred to you that you have done a deeply, deeply fucked-up thing, and that you are likely a deeply, deeply fucked-up person?
A brief pause. Then:
Yes.
The urge to keep going was a hard one to ignore, but the one thing I knew was that I couldn’t give this person anything else. So, I tried not to remember all of the things I’d said in the last month, the intimate things that I never would have spoken aloud to anyone. Things that felt safe only because I knew, deep down, they would never be read. A new message came from him:
I thought about never telling you.
Then:
But then I actually thought that might be worse.
And finally:
I never meant to keep doing it. And I didn’t know that Jonah was going to kill himself. I’m not sure I can really explain it all right now. Like this.
I stared at the screen. I was able to quell the growing rage and confusion enough to type one last line. There was only one more thing I wanted to know before I extricated myself from all of this and curled up in the fetal position on the floor. And it was something simple.
You never answered my first question.
A short pause.
My name is Daniel Torres. I was Jonah’s roommate at MIT.
