I've been thinking about a guy from my past a lot recently. Its not someone I ever actually met. We talked (well, emailed, MSN) from when I was about 13, to when I was 21. In that time we talked almost every day. We last emailed about 3 years ago.
I signed into an email account I don't often use and found all our old emails. Well, not that there were many emails, it was mostly MSN. I did used to have some of the conversations saved but I lost them a long time ago.

It brought it all back. I have tried so many times to tell myself I did not love him. But I did. I really truly did. And now part of me is thinking that I still do. Which is idiotic. I've not spoken to him properly since 2011. One of his last proper emails to me said he watched my part of my graduation ceremony. I knew this guy for about 8 years. Since I was 13. I talked to him pretty much every night for a large part of that. We made love: I did things for him on cam I never thought i'd do. I took pictures of myself to show to him. OKay so it was never physical sex, but it was as close as you could get, at least on my part when I was still a virgin. And what did I ever get off him? A distorted picture, never a webcam because it was 'broken' and he couldn't afford to get a new one.
The last email I sent him three years ago asked who he really was. It never got a reply. I've tried looking him up on facebook and linkedin, there's a few people I think might be him, but really I know nothing about him.

What I've been told.
He is from Newcastle upon Tyne. Loads of stuff he said had a Geordie swing to them, but how easy is that to fake online.
He went to Newcastle University before going to Seattle to study. I supposedly talked to his roommate in uni in Seattle, Mike, who was studying to become a doctor. Could have been the same person. Probably was the same person.
After Seattle he went to New York. One of the emails I found the other day described how he was in Chicago on his drive to NYC. He said he missed me.
His birthday is 23rd April, St George's Day.
He studied Civil Engineering.
When he was in NYC he had a job, a flat with a few others.
He loved his motorbike, had a dog, went to Newcastle a few times for a few weekends between 2008-10. I was in Newcastle Uni at the time. He did not try and meet me.
After a few years in NYC his contract came to an end, he moved to London after spending a little bit of time in Newcastle. Again, did not try and meet me. But by this point we were barely talking.
When he was younger he apparently won the junior karate competition in the North East. I tried googling this at the time, I found something that lead me to believe him, I can't remember what I found.

I loved him. Or was obsessed with him. I'm thinking about him now and I hate it. I tried to email him recently but so far have heard nothing back. I only have one email address for him, and he used to barely check it in the end. I didn't get a bounceback email. I've just googled and Hotmail close an account if there is no activity in 120 days.
Even if he does still check it, what's the guarantee that he still wants to talk.

This guy was my everything, yet I wasn't worth spending a little bit of money on to get a webcam, even after all those years. He wished me a happy valentines day one year, I repayed the favour with dirty pictures.
I was so in love with him I'm actually crying writing this. Am I still in love with him? God knows. I'm curious about him. I want to know who he was. It doesn't help that he always told me his surname was 'Robinson' yet his email was always 'Roberts'. It was probably something else. He didn't even want me to know his name.

He knew how I felt about him. Whether he knew to the full extent, I don't know. Whether he put it down to teenage crush... Its what I used to put it down to looking back. But if that were true why do I still feel like this now, after just reading a few emails from him. Is it just it coming back to me?
One of the things I remember most at the moment is during either my A Levels or GCSEs. I think it was my GCSEs. There was a song he said he and his band had written a few years back. He played guitar and sang. It was a song that each time I listened to it made me feel like he was there with me. It wasn't a love song, it was a song about a guy getting dumped. But it was him who wrote it, him who was singing it. It made me feel so close to him, it made me happy and sad at the same time. This is going back 10 years now, so I didn't know how to find things on the internet so easily. I found my old MP3 player about a year ago and remembered that song, and the way it made me feel. There were about two or three songs, I loved all of them because I could feel him in the words. So there i am, about a year, 18 months ago. And I think, I wonder what would happen if I googled it. I dunno, maybe I was hoping I'd find a youtube video and see him (I'd seen about two pictures of this guy in 9 years, one topless one from when he was about 18, and one from a camping trip, it was a picture from a distance). So yeah, I googled it. Turned out it was a song by Catweasels, which actually I've just looked again and they are actually from Newcastle. I looked them up on myspace, no mention of anyone called Martin. That hurt me so much, I felt like I'd been torn apart.

If he emailed me back telling me he wasn't who he said he was, I think I would forgive him. I mean, he helped me so much in my teenage years, and during uni. I've never been the most socialable type, i've always had trouble making friends, so maybe i clung to him. Maybe I'm concentrating on the way he used to make me feel, and i'm just romanticising everything else again.

I'm not a shallow person, looks don't really mean a lot to me, I care a lot more about what the person is like and how he makes me feel. He might not have been truthful about everything, but surely all our conversations weren't a lie. Would someone really go through all those years of everything if it wasn't real? Surely I would just become too much effort for someone who was just trying to pull something and have fun.

Saying that, when we first started talking I'm sure it was through a chat site, I had so many issues I often went on chatrooms looking for someone to talk to to stop the lonliness, stop the self loathing and hatred. Originally he used a different email, I'm sure I could remember it. Something chavvy. He annoyed the hell out of me to begin with, but for some reason we kept chatting.
Back then it was all MSN so there's very little log of our conversations. The first email I have from him on the email account he said something, something generic like hey, then followed it up with a preposition for oral sex. Which I guess at the time I thought was charming and flattering because I asked if he really wanted to do that to me, and seemed amazed he would want to. I didn't have much self esteem back then, I mean I don't really now but I'm not as naïve. Or at least I didn't think I was until all these feelings came flooding back to me.
As I said before, I did do things on cam for him I didn't think I'd ever do. So maybe this is just me hoping that I didn't do that for a 60 year old man. But maybe I did. But then I didn't do that for years after we started talking, if he wasn't who he said he was would he have gone through that?

Lets just imagine for a few minutes he was who he said he was. That raises a few more questions.
Why would he not meet me when he was back in town. The excuses always were he wasn't in town for long. Which, fair enough. A couple of times he was back in town were during the holidays so I was back at home (200 miles from Newcastle). He would have had so many other people to catch up with. But then why tell me. Was it to rub it in my face? Was it to prove a point. He never came across as vindictive.

When I asked him a few years ago if he was real, why did he not reply. Was it simply that he had not checked his account. Note earlier I said that hotmail keeps an account active for up to 120 days before deleting due to inactivity. He would have seen that message and chosen to not reply. He could have been insulted my what I said, I know I would be if someone I trusted and had talked to for all those years questioned me like that. I probably wouldn’t have replied to it.

Imagine he's real. So. What now. What am I hoping for. Its been 3 years since we had any communication of any kind. He could be married. He could have kids. Heck, three years is enough time to get married, get divorced and potentially even get married again. He could have three kids. He may always have had kids. He could be in Newcastle. He could be in London. He could be anywhere in America, anywhere in the world.
He replies. Then what. Am I hoping everything is going to go back to how it was when I was 16? Am I hoping he's going to ask me to meet him finally after all these years.

Say he's not real, or not who he said he was. We live in a completely different time now to when we were talking. Everyone has a smartphone, there's no excuse now for not sending a picture. Say he reads the email. If he even remembers me. So he's read the email, and wants to talk to me (two very big ifs right there, before anything else). He either has to continue the lie, which will now greatly have an expiration date that he can't avoid. He knows that I would want a picture after all this time. He wouldn't be able to squirm out of it like he did all those times before. No more 'oh my cam is broken'; no more 'oh I can't find a cable for my digital camera'. No. Doesn't work.

His other option is to finally come clean. Tell me who he is. Why would he bother doing that though when he could just as easily ignore me, pretend he doesn't use that account anymore. I'd never know anything else.

One of the most persistant theories about him looking back is that he was an alias of a person I'm just going to call SM. SM was a personal terrorist to me. He was abusive, controlling, bullying, but yet I talked to him. All through uni he pretty much blackmailed me into talking to him, emotionally (saying he had never had a friend like me, he would miss me too much if i left him, he would have no reason to carry on living). There was a time I thought I loved him but that's a whole other story. SM and I had a very fraught relationship for 90% of the time we were taking. Martin knew about SM, but not the other way around. SM was already trying to blackmail me for some stuff he found out (I had a very troubled few teenage years and ended up posting naked pictures of myself on some chat rooms, they turned up on an Encyclopedia Dramatica page about the site and he happened to stumble across them, how coincidentally I never knew but he always denied it was him who posted them to the website), and I knew that he would not take kindly to my feelings towards Martin.

Do I think SM could have pulled this off for 8-9 years? Short answer, it is highly possible. SM was cruel, and hated me talking to anyone but him. But I'm paranoid at the best of times. I often spoke to them both on MSN at the same time, so i doubt it. But I know it’s a possibility. I know that SM was real, we had met up several times. But what would be the point of him doing this. He had made other accounts to talk to me previously, but he often gave these up after a few hours because I wasn't interested. But with this one I was. So maybe he did keep it up. I always push this to the back of my head but i do know it’s a high possibility. Logistically I doubt it would work, and why would he bother emailing me for a few years after.

I'm questioning everything i thought i thought about this guy. I did love him, i have come to realise that in the last few years (I don't often think about this guy, but when i do its always the same taut feeling in my chest, a feeling of overwhelming happiness before anything else). I don't think i do still love this guy, but i think i just have so much unanswered about him, i have no closure. It just fizzled. And that is not how this should have ended.