vanishing act

I originally met Martel on a board in middle school. It was one of those weird post-apocalyptic comics that owe some memetic lineage to Roadside Picnic, a setting of alternate timelines and personal struggles that attracted a diverse crowd, all of us young and alienated and bitter about the world for reasons we couldn't understand, and many of us still have no idea. I spent hours and hours on that board and its intimate little community, enough so that when the moderator fucked off for good I was the next, and last, to wear the hat. Nobody else remembers that comic, and there were less than twenty people remaining when the forum went offline, so nearly nobody remembers us but ourselves. (The comic itself had ceased updating two years prior.)
By then we had already become a guild of two. We would follow each other from game to game, building coalitions to insult and harass, to protect and insulate. I sent him gifts occasionally. I would tell my mother it was for me, and then I would send it off to his P.O. Box. Occasionally he would send me things as well. By the time I moved away for college, I had an entire box devoted to the plundered antiquities of Southwestern native americans.