Chapter 03 — Mon Papyrus

Forge — November 1999 — Brussels, Belgium

The train slowed, its rhythmic clatter softening to a sigh as it slid past the old Côte d'Or factory. Even with the windows sealed shut, the air inside the carriage thickened with the smell of chocolate—a rich, sweet, slightly burnt scent that meant he was almost home. Gabriel pressed his forehead against the cool glass. The train glided into Brussels Central, and for a moment, he felt a flicker of pride. Central, not Nord, where he used to get off. The change, a single stop farther, was minimal. In theory. For Gabriel, it was a giant leap from Rue des Patriotes, with its memories of the greedy landlord with the unsanitary apartment with cold, forever damp rooms with moldy walls. What an upgrade.

From the station, he caught the sixty-three bus headed for the Brussels Cemetery, a lumbering yellow-and-blue beast that would crawl for nearly an hour from the city's heart to its farthest edge. At the terminus, he stepped out and walked the last ten minutes, the apartment complex looming at the top of the quasi-hill. It was a strange, hulking structure, a drunken mistake of architecture sobered up and patched together. Home.

Inside, a cramped vestibule greeted him. One step forward brought him to the base of the stairs of death, a steep, narrow flight that seemed designed to ensure no tenant ever got too comfortable. He climbed, emerging beside the flimsy railing that guarded the gaping stairwell cut into the middle of the living room, a feature so baffling he had long ago stopped trying to understand it. The apartment was a collection of tiny rooms branching off a single, awkwardly spacious living area. His own room, tucked next to his sister Assumpta's, was barely large enough for a single bed and a desk, with no space between for a chair. He sat on the bed to use the computer. It was a cell. It was his sanctuary.

Friday night followed a rigid ritual. Dinner. Always his mother's cooking. The scent of overcooked palm oil coating the back of his throat like a film. Onions sizzling as they hit the piping-hot pan, flash-frying in seconds. Afterward, Assumpta washed the dishes; he took out the trash. Once his duties were done, once he was sure no other task could be thrown his way, he slipped into his room and closed the door. The key was long gone, confiscated by his brother after a complaint from his mother, but a well-placed box of old magazines against the door served as a decent barricade, an early-warning system against intrusion, maybe even a middle finger he dared not admit to, not even to himself.

He sat on the bed, the mattress springs groaning in protest, and switched on the computer. The tower whirred to life. He double-clicked the dial-up icon, and the world outside his door dissolved into the sacred song of the modem—a screech, a series of clicks, and a final, triumphant hiss that meant he was connected. He was free. Best of all, he alone knew that no one could reach the family phone while he was connected to the Internet. He couldn't stay long in any case. By then, he knew what to expect if he did something to piss off his brother—like run up the phone bill. Gabriel might be too old to spank, but he definitely wasn't too old for a beat down.

The online world was where life happened. It was the thrill of the ICQ “uh-oh” notification, a sound that made his heart race with the promise of a new message from a friend halfway across the planet. It was the fan fiction email chains, communities of people who understood that someone didn't need to exist to be real. And it was Mon Papyrus, his website, a place of his own where the stories in his head could find a home. Here, behind the glow of the bulky monitor, he wasn't the awkward, lanky teenager who was too quiet. He was a creator, a builder of worlds woven from threads plucked from otherworldly realms, stretching them, twisting them, making them his own.

On Saturdays, the real world invaded. The muffled hum of visitors began in the living room, a low rumble that grew as more people arrived until the apartment sounded like a concert venue. Laughter, indistinct chatter, the clinking of glasses—the sounds bled through the poorly soundproofed walls, a constant reminder of the life he was not a part of. Then came the footsteps, each one a drumbeat of anxiety as they neared his door. Mostly, when he went quiet, fingers hovering over the keyboard, shoulders hunched like a witch above her cauldron, the steps eventually retreated. Other times, like now, no such luck.

"Gabriel? Come say hello." His mother's voice, strained with the effort of playing hostess.

He sighed, disconnected the modem, and pushed the box away from the door. He emerged into the living room, blinking in the light. The room was full of people he didn't remember, faces smiling at him with a politeness as flimsy as the railing by the suicide stairs. He said his hellos, endured the awkward small talk, and tried to retreat, but a hand clamped down on his shoulder. It was one of the men; it was always one of the men, a distant cousin or a friend of the family, his face radiating the unearned confidence of someone about to explain how life worked. Gabriel resented the intrusion into his home, his personal space, his intimacy. It was bad enough to mourn a father whose memories faded as he grew, shrinking from main to supporting character and, eventually, to the kind who got a name but no backstory. The last thing he needed was some weekend father figure passing down imagined wisdom.

"You're always locked in that room," the man said, his voice loud enough for everyone to hear. "You need to go out more. Get some sun. How are you ever going to meet a girl staring at a screen all day? What can you possibly be doing in there, anyway?"

Gabriel's eyes darted to his mother. She stood by the kitchen doorway, offering a small, apologetic smile that was also a nod of agreement. In her silence, he heard a familiar betrayal. Sometimes, he wished he didn't keep so much inside. Wished he were easier to set off. How he would love to explode now, like the sons in the movies who called their mothers bitches and screamed at man stereotype number forty-two that they were not his father. Then storm to his room and, of course, slam the door. He wasn't hurting anyone. He wasn't out drinking, experimenting with drugs, or fighting. He was building. He was creating. But they couldn't see it. To them, this was a sickness, a phase, a problem to be solved. He mumbled, "Got stuff to do," and made his escape, the man's laughter following him back to his room.

He barricaded the door, as much as a pile of periodicals could be construed as a barricade, the muffled party sounds pressing in on him. He sat in the dark for a long moment, the man's words echoing in his ears. Once he'd buried the anger he was powerless to express, he reconnected. The modem sang its song of liberation. An ICQ window was blinking. And on the Mon Papyrus homepage, there was a new comment. A piece of fan mail from a girl in Australia who had read his latest short story. She wrote about his characters as if they were real, exactly as he saw them. She loved the world he had described, a world he had built from nothing but words.

Something shifted. This wasn't just an escape anymore. Fan fiction was a foundation, a sandbox. But the worlds of others belonged to their owners and obeyed their rules. Though crucial for his growth, those universes were finite. His own were boundless. Inside those worlds, he was a guest in someone else's house. But if he stepped inside his own creation, he could build a thousand worlds, each with a thousand lands, places where no one could tell him he was living his life wrong.

The weekend ended, as it always did, in darkness. At four in the morning on Monday, long before the sun breached the horizon, his alarm buzzed. He dressed in the silent apartment and slipped out, walking the ten minutes to the bus stop. The streetlights cast long, lonely shadows.

The bus stop's only other landmark was the long, imposing wall of the Brussels Cemetery. The air was cold and still. The silence here wasn't peaceful like in his room; it was heavy, filled with unspoken things. Every week, the same gloom. Evicted from the only life he wanted to call real and sent back to reality. Back to the boarding school with the nuns and the prayers, where there was no retreat to be had, no corner to call his own. As he stood there, nursing dark thoughts, his imagination, fueled by a thousand strange stories, began to populate the darkness beyond the cemetery wall. Sometimes, having an active imagination really, really sucked.

Ignoring the skeletal figures surely creeping up on him, and not at all the naked autumnal branches, Gabriel hugged himself against the chill.

Sometimes, nearly three decades later, I still go back to Mon Papyrus on the Wayback Machine. Half the pages don’t load. Images are gone, borders misaligned, hyperlinks leading nowhere. Yet the skeleton remains—the same blue-on-black layout I built in Namo WebEditor, all bevels and drop shadows, the height of late-nineties pride. I scroll through it like a visitor in a ruined temple, smiling at my own earnest excess. Everything was too much back then: the fonts, the dreams, the hunger to be seen.

And people did see me. Just not in the way I thought I deserved to be seen. No publishers were dueling at my door for the right to bask in my genius. No hordes of fans, enamored girls throwing undergarments in my wake. Hey, what do you expect from a teenager almost as full of himself as his body was flooded with hormones?

Of course, back then, I had yet to learn that being an avid reader and capable of stringing together two sentences does not a great writer make. Beyond that girl in Australia, there were others whose praise pushed me to yearn for more. Beyond praise, though, there was something about hearing how your words touched someone else that created a connection… something—forgive the melodrama—transcendent. There was this woman in France, for example, who wrote me an email to say one of my stories had moved her and that a certain passage would stay with her ad vitam aeternam. I remember neither the day, the story, nor even the passage. But I remember the moment. I remember her and that she signed off with a simple “Merci.” That one message lodged itself under my skin more firmly than any critique or compliment since. A stranger had read something I made and felt enough to reach out. You don’t forget that kind of echo. Case in point, here I am, talking about it.

I don't think Mon Papyrus was only a hiding place. It was the first declaration of intent, even if I didn’t know what I was declaring yet. Behind the bad graphics was a freedom I never appreciated in the moment. One, in fact, that I didn't recognize as such until much later. How much later? Too damn much. It took decades of turning in circles like a dog chasing its own tail and dealing with my hardest thing, before I could finally see it. A multitude of whys contributed to the loss, but the only one that matters is that I let it. This isn't pure self-flagellation; it's recognition. Something pushed and I folded.

I wish I’d kept that fearless openness, the willingness to expose myself… all in good taste, of course. I miss the thrill of posting unfinished thoughts, of recognizing that there's a difference between good, great, and perfect. Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, I began to search for perfection in my writing, and from there came a crippling hunger to write for validation rather than feeling or expression. This truth, when it drops, hurts. Bad. You realize you've betrayed and shackled yourself. Worse, you know that only you were the accuser, cop, judge, jury, and executioner. So, yeah. It fucking sucks.

Don't feel too bad for me. This isn't lamentation, dear friend. This is celebration because… well, painful as it is, understanding what held me back has restored that lost freedom. It's no longer an obstacle, no longer an invisible stone waiting to break my hoe. Now, I can safely look at it, all the way back there. Behind me.

So yes, Mon Papyrus is gone. Yet, it remains. Whether as dead code and broken links, as a memory living with someone who once read something that spoke to them, or as my own memory, proof that I once had the temerity to stand tall and broadcast myself to the world, it's there. Thank you, Mon Papyrus. More than a secret haven, you were the sacred place where I first explored, recognized, and expressed who I was.

A writer.