ryuken
Fuchsia
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2024
- Posts
- 11,931
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He was twelve when he made the account, hunched over the family computer at midnight, the room lit blue by a monitor that hummed like it was alive. He didn’t think much about the username— @Imretarded? —just a dumb, edgy joke that felt funny in the way things only do when you’re too young to know better. It stuck. Everything does, online.
The forum was small and messy and perfect. Threads about games that barely ran, memes that took a full minute to load, inside jokes that made no sense if you weren’t there every night. His profile picture was his pride: a black, overexposed photo of blackgymmax that has oversized nazi-symbol, half-smiling like he’d been caught mid-laugh. Someone once commented, “best pfp on the site,” and he rode that high for weeks.
Years passed without him noticing. The forum slowed. People stopped posting. One day the site went down, and no one made a big deal about it—because no one was left to.
Much later, older now, he found an old screenshot buried in a forgotten folder. There it was: the username, the terrible spelling, the profile pic that had once felt like a flag planted in the world. He cringed at the name, winced at the joke, but smiled anyway.
It wasn’t about the username. It was about being young and anonymous and loud in a quiet room, about thinking a forum could last forever, about a time when the internet felt smaller and warmer, like a place that knew you back.
He closed the folder gently, like you would an old yearbook. Some things don’t need to be reopened to matter.
The forum was small and messy and perfect. Threads about games that barely ran, memes that took a full minute to load, inside jokes that made no sense if you weren’t there every night. His profile picture was his pride: a black, overexposed photo of blackgymmax that has oversized nazi-symbol, half-smiling like he’d been caught mid-laugh. Someone once commented, “best pfp on the site,” and he rode that high for weeks.
Years passed without him noticing. The forum slowed. People stopped posting. One day the site went down, and no one made a big deal about it—because no one was left to.
Much later, older now, he found an old screenshot buried in a forgotten folder. There it was: the username, the terrible spelling, the profile pic that had once felt like a flag planted in the world. He cringed at the name, winced at the joke, but smiled anyway.
It wasn’t about the username. It was about being young and anonymous and loud in a quiet room, about thinking a forum could last forever, about a time when the internet felt smaller and warmer, like a place that knew you back.
He closed the folder gently, like you would an old yearbook. Some things don’t need to be reopened to matter.
