Dear Jöshua,
You’ve talked about your many aliases over the years online, even though I only know of a couple of them, and you know of the many names I go by. The analogy we’ve used in where we’ve pleased each other in our lives has been Misato and Kaji since we started gushing about our histories and fandoms to each other. They were pseudonyms we had at one point in our pasts before we even met each other, and somehow that lined up.
One online alias I used as a teenager was Persephone, I can’t remember if I ever referenced it. I’d heard of Lore Olympus for a while and have seen a lot of beautiful cosplay from it but hadn’t read the comic until recently. It brings a lot of… something out of me, and if I was Persephone I guess that assigned you Aidoneus (which I had thought of a couple times over the years but never mentioned). I thought you lived more like I was Buffy and you were Angel, where you felt your happiness was forbidden and our lives depended on it. I was pissed, we’re not fictional characters. We had a real, something. I felt like for years I poured over- I overflowed with love for you that had nowhere to go, that couldn’t be received, and that drowned me. It sits in reserve, that river doesn’t flow to you (it can’t), but I’ve had some relief in finding new love that has space to be received. It’s not an erasure of our history and your influence, it doesn’t take your place, but it gives me a warmth and color in my life that’s been painfully missing for a long time. I’m rambling at 1:07am. This has been swimming in my mind for a while, but it’s being written out due to some influence from here. I wonder how much of that resonated with you, or if I’m off. I don’t know what your life looks like now, but I hope you’re okay.