Anyone here have any pen-pals?
I was a very lonely teenager who liked buying Kerrang! and listening to loud music which understood the pain and suffering I was experiencing on a daily basis. In Kerrang, every week, they’d have a section for pen pal requests where people would say a little about themselves and then you could write to them and potentially get yourself a penpal. I wrote to a few with some innocuous stuff, and some didn’t reply, or just replied once, but one replied very enthusiastically, a goth girl from Peterborough.
She seemed nice, even though she talked a lot about witchcraft and things like that, but I have to admit, that was something I knew very little about and mostly thought was silly. However I kept it going because it was someone who seemed genuinely interested in the things I had to say and I was absolutely starved of social interaction at that age.
We wrote back and forth for months, where I kinda kept it a secret that I was getting more into bands like Symposium and Midget rather than embracing the whole summoning the dead etc. but I made sure that I didn’t lie about anything, rather just steer the conversation away from the occult and metal. We still had plenty to talk about with school woes and general feelings of injustice so despite everything, we still wrote to each other regularly.
Then after some time it progressed to telephone conversations, where it was a little harder to keep the whole facade of still liking metal going, but since she did most of the talking anyway, it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t long before this progressed to talk of actually meeting face-to-face, and after some time and persuasion, eventually, my parents agreed to let me go meet her and stay at her place. Looking back it’s a bit crazy that my parents let a 15-year-old travel across the country to stay at a girl’s house that he’d never met, but none-the-less, I was on my way.
When we met face to face, I made sure I wore my KoRn t-shirt so as to show that I did still like metal, and remember thinking she was very attractive when we met up. We chatted for a while at her parents place where she lived, mainly her doing the talking like it was on the phone, and me agreeing and echoing sentiments. Unfortunately though, this was the whole night and not just an hour long like on the phone, and before long the chat had dried up. We ended up watching episodes of Rikki Lake on the TV before she went to bed and I slept on the sofa.
The next morning, she went out before I got up, so her mum came to wake me up and tell me before driving me back to the train station. I remember thinking that it was much easier chatting to the mum, though even in my naive way, I could tell that she was feeling massively sorry for me with the whole situation.
I caught the train back to Wales, and never spoke to the girl again. Unfortunately, I also binned all of the letters in my heartbroken state, which is a shame as the whole thing seems almost as though it never happened now aside from the memory. I even forgot her surname until one point a few years ago where I suddenly remembered it and amazingly found her profile on Facebook. In her pic she was using poi and dressed in some sort of furry neon outfit. I thought it was probably best to just leave the past in the past.
