Note: In a real way, I have been writing this article for a very long time. The following post features details of sexual harassment, stalking, and how I had to deal with both after being turned away by the system. It is not a nice story. There is no real happy ending in all of this. But I feel as though hearing what happened to me could be of value to other people. As such, consider this your trigger warning.-J
“Wait, isn’t she the crazy one? The one that like, stabs herself in the gut?”
My partner, they’re staring at the back of my laptop. Right at a sticker in the upper right corner. It’s passe to have stickers on your laptop, I know. But when I saw this one online? I had to have it. Something in my head guided my hand to “purchase”. Before I knew what was happening, it was on it’s way.
She’s right, by the way. The sticker, it’s a girl from a horror game. She gets obsessed with the player-then shoves a butcher knife in her gut when she can’t have them. It’s a gruesome scene.
She’s also the character I loved the most.
I grunt in affirmation, and keep typing. My partner side eyes me, then says what everyone does.
“You sure like the scary types, don’t you?”
My fingers stop hitting keys. My lips stretch into a smile, one so rehearsed that it’s instinctual. I started doing it about the time I got into yandere stuff. Because if I smiled, I didn’t have to tell anyone the truth. Most of the time it works just fine. They drop the subject and we go on with life.
“You’re damned right,” I say. I give them a grimey wink. They roll their eyes, and laugh. Like I said-most of the time, that’s the extent of the conversation. People write my tastes off as an eccentric quirk, an occasional joke. But my partner, they know so much better.
“So tell me about her,” they say. I glance up at her as my stomach drops. With a cigarette in their lips, they hold up a lighter. The flame dances for a fraction of a second, their face in full reveal. In that moment, my heart swells at the singular beauty of their being. It grows until a voice in the back of my head says “It’s time, they need to know, tell them,”
Because whenever people ask about my “weird tastes”, my “love of crazy”, it’s never about the character. Not really. They might not be aware of it when they ask, but it’s never just about the character. It’s kind of like how people ask what your favorite piece of media is. They’re wanting more about you.
I shut my laptop. I glance the sticker-the crazy girl from the game. With her sad eyes, her long purple hair.
I start from the top, and I tell them everything.
“The Long Halloween”:
Telling people I’m into yandere stuff is always met with one of two reactions.
They call me a “weeb” and laugh. Or they raise their eyebrow, they scoot a few paces away from me. I get it, I do. It’s not exactly a “mainstream” thing. “Yandere” is a japanese phrase which means “love sick”. In popular media, it’s often portrayed as incredibly obsessive characters who reach a point of committing heinous violence for their targets of love. Not exactly the fluffiest thing to admit is a kink. As a adult content producer myself, it’s even stranger to admit to with consent, mutual admiration and love being paramount to all I do.
But the reason I kin to yandere stuff, it’s not for the reason you think. It turns me on, but not because I find it hot.
It’s because therapy is expensive.
I should probably roll that back a bit.
Hi, I’m Jack.
I’m not a particularly attractive man. I have horrible social skills. This made finding love in the first half of my life really hard. So I settled. You probably settled a bit yourself. Getting into relationships with people you weren’t sure of simply to have someone to talk to. It’s okay-I did it, you did it. We all did it. We did so with the hope that we’d find someone, anyone, that could make us feel wanted. Valued.
I thought I’d found that with Yuno. No, that’s not her real name. I’d never type it for fear she might find this article.
It’s years later, and I still can’t bring myself to risk it.
I met Yuno after going through a string of one-night stands, single dates and thousands of texts. All ruined by my total social ineptness. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, and it poured into every interaction I had. But I knew in my heart what I needed-someone, anyone to convince me to stick around. I was desperate, depressed and had never felt more alone.
Which made me fantastic bait.
It was close to Halloween. Our town, it’s small as a pillbox. But it goes all out for the holidays. Halloween was a special time for festivals, bake sales and more. So I got on Tinder, and phrased things as innocuously as I could.
“Seeking someone to enjoy the season with”.
A single sentence, nothing more.
A moment later I got a message. It was a simple “hi”. I went to the profile, and felt my heart throb.
She was cute. Really cute. Short with dark hair, green eyes and glasses. In her pic, she was holding a cat. So I responded warmly. We went back and forth for about an hour before I finally worked the nerve to ask her out. She agreed, and I felt like I was flying.
Yuno and I met in public, in town square. Right by this massive water fountain we had. I stood there for tens of minutes, looking around. Constantly checking my phone. Then by happenstance, I glanced sidways-and there she was. In the flesh, and just as cute as her picture. I smiled, and waved. She gave a small wave back-but didn’t smile.
Looking back, I realize that was the first sign. She lacked warmth. It wasn’t just the smile-it was everything about how she interacted with me.
The date went well. I asked her if she wanted to come back to my place and watch horror movies. She agreed with a singular “yes”. I made the joke that I lived isolated in the woods, that it would be the perfect setting. Yuno just nodded.
We got in our car, and drove fourty five minutes back to my house. When she got out, she stared all around my property. Like she was taking in every detail. When her eyes fell upon my house, she stood there a long while. Just staring at it. I jangled my keys, and she finally broke her gaze away.
We went inside and watched Jacob’s Ladder. One of my favorite movies. We sat on the couch, and she took my hand halfway through. She didn’t speak much, but I figured she was like me. Looking for someone, just like me. When the movie was over, Yuno got up. She hugged me really tight, and said “I’ll see you soon”.
Then she walked out the door, got in her car and left. I got a beer, downed it and went to bed. As I laid there, heart pounding with excitement, there was a nagging voice. One that kept pointing out how little she said. How little she reacted to anything. She was a person, sure. But she lacked a soul.
I told myself that maybe she was like me. Just shy, just trying to figure it all out. I fell asleep with the ghost of her hand on mine.
The next morning, I had twenty texts. All from Yuno. They ran the gammut from “hey” to “r u awake?”. But they kept going on, later and later into the night. Then things got weird.
“I’m fingering myself thinking about you,”
“I’m going 2 b so pretty w u inside me”.
Reading those over my coffee the next morning? Yeah, that nagging voice got really loud. I texted her back. I politely told her I didn’t think it was going to work out. I slipped my phone into my jeans, and went about my day. I didn’t get a single text. Not at first, any rate.
I was laying in bed the next night when they started.
“FUck you I fucking was willing to do anything you wanted”
“plz give me a chance I love u plz plz plz”
“You’re a fucking faggot aren’t you?”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t really know what exactly to say, frankly. About the time the tenth one rolled in at the top of the hour, I blocked her number. I blocked her on tinder. For the first time in years, I got up and locked my front door.
I lived in the middle of nowhere, forty five minutes from civilization. My nearest neighbor was almost an hour away. Isolated in the woods on my little hill, I figured someone would have to be crazy to come out.
I was right.
“You’re a big ol’ boy”:
The cop I’m talking to, he’s checked his phone every five minutes for the last hour. He’s tapped messages away as I sit on the other side of the desk, my palms up. I’m waiting on him yet again to give me anything, to say anything. His cheeks puffed with a chaw of tobacco, and he glances up at me like I’m wallpaper.
“So you’re saying this girl won’t leave you alone? That it?”
That It?
Like I was asking him to make a burger run.
I look down at the ziplock of blood stained photos she left on my porch. All of Yuno herself. I look at the panties, ones that were stained and left hanging outside my bedroom window. At the stacks of messages she sent me on every social I had.
“Um. Officer, did you hear anything I said? She’s crazy,”
The chaw shifts in his jaw, and he glances down at the stuff on the desk. His eyes flick back to his phone. He taps another message, and looks back at me.
“Well, we can get a restraining order if you want son,”
I left it all with the cop.
I just got up, walked out. He said something from behind me, something I didn’t catch until I was already out the door.
“You’re a big ol’ boy-what are you worried about a lil’ ol’ girl for?”
All this stuff, it had accumulated since last year. Once or twice a month she would do something. At first I just thought it was weird-but past a point I had enough. So I tried to do the right thing. I went to the cops, a box full of all this stuff.
I thought it would help. I thought they could make a difference.
I sat in my car near the police station, red hot fury filling me from my stomach. I slammed my hand against my steering wheel, and tried not to cry. All I ended up doing was busting my knuckles. So I leaned back in my seat. I checked the lock on my door, made sure it was set. Then I reached into my shirt pocket, and pulled out a cigarette. I turned on the radio, and listened to Tom Waits talk about bombs blowing people apart.
The nicotine hit, and the shaking in my hands stopped. I turned my phone on, waiting just a moment. To see if I’d have another text from another number I’d have to block. I didn’t. I turned the car over, and made my way home. The entire way, what the cop said kept rolling in my head.
“You’re a big ol’ boy-what are you worried about?”
The rage gave way to a very, very cold logic that crept up my spine. The cop, he was right. This wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. It wasn’t like I was going to get help.
So at a stop light, I looked up self defense laws for North Carolina.
I turned, and went to a sporting goods store. I bought some game cameras, the kind you use to track deer. Then I went to the hardware store, and bought some cheap door alarms. They had a whole set that came with this infrared thing that set off a central alert unit. I picked that up too.
I pulled into my house about an hour later. I got out of the car, and waited. I listened, but all I heard was the trees and the birds. I checked the ground-and that’s when I saw it.
Yuno was crazy, but she had a knack for getting around. Along the same grassy paths deer took in front of my place I found a foot print. Too small to be a guys, too large to be a kids. And that left only one person. I looked around-and found some tire tracks. She drove up through the grass, thinking I wouldn’t notice.
I set up those cameras, those alarms right away. For a week, nothing happened.
Then came the worst night of my entire life.
I was sitting in bed when it happened. That infrared thing, it went off. I bolted when I heard this whine coming from the main unit. I sat there, staring at it as it flashed.
Part of me said not to worry. That it was just a deer, a raccoon or something. Anything could have set it off.
The other part though, it crept beenath the bed. It grabbed a shotgun that had been there for the better part of a year. I’d only ever used it for deer hunting. I pulled it into my hand, and went and turned off all my lights. I crouched beside my bed, ears pinned as my blood pounded in my ears.
For twenty minutes I sat there. In the dark, so still I didn’t even breathe.
Then came the flashlight at the window. It was the one on the far wall, right in my bedroom. An LED ray that cut through the dark.
I gripped my shotgun tighter, and aimed it right towards the window. When it slid up, I held my breath.
The window raised, and Yuno’s dark hair poked in. She aimed the flashlight at my bedroom door-then at me as I racked a shell.
“Yuno, you can leave here head first or feet first,” I said. I tried to sound as hard as I could. But inside, my guts were writing like copperheads in a sack.
From the glow of her light, I saw something I’d never seen.
She smiled.
“You’re not going to shoot me Jack,” she said. Her voice all calm, all measured like it had been every time she called. Every time she “ran into me” in public. Like it did the first time we met.
I curled my finger around the trigger and pulled.
I can’t say now if not aiming at her was a concious decision, or the very last bit of my humanity pulling the barrel. But the blast landed about eight inches from her face, causing her to scream as she dropped her flash light. Dry wall dust circled in the air as I got a look at her.
She was afraid. She was absolutely fucking terrified.
I racked another shell, and let out a yell that didn’t sound like any noise I’d ever made before. Yuno scrambled from the window, and I came barreling through after her. She had made it to the treeline by the time I aimed, and disappeared into the pines. For a long while I stood there, my finger on the trigger, panting and sweating.
Minute by minute I lowered the gun.
Then I doubled over and vomitted.
I went back in the house. I made sure everything was locked. I closed the window, and looked at the wall. I didn’t sleep the rest of the week-every time I laid down, I looked at that patch where I’d shot on the wall and my stomach rolled all over again.
It was the calmest week of my entire life. Then the calmest month. Then two, then season.
By the end of the year, Yuno wasn’t gone from my memory. But I’d patched the wall. I’d started dating again.
But there was still this part of me, this chip in it all, that remained tense. Coiled and writhing, waiting. Expecting another girl like her. Expecting all my partners to be like her.
I found them from the safety of my screen.
Crazy (Safe) Love:
A couple of things happened after Yuno finally left me alone.
I stopped hunting. I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. I’d hunted almost my entire life, and the very thought of it just made me sick. Every time I thought about putting something in my sights, I saw her.
I started noticing minor things in the media I consumed. The porn, especially. I was always a simple guy to please-chubby, shy girls always made me happy. But those same girls, they started to play more agressive roles. They started saying things that sounded really familiar. Things I’d heard for a year straight.
Clicking on “yandere” on my favorite porn site was happenstance-and then it made sense.
The chip, the part of my brain that had told me all of this was normal, it was still decompressing. It was still coming to terms with how Yuno had affected my ability to interact with normal relationships, and sex. There was a hole where her obsession, however horrific it had all been during it, was. Some part of me had internalized what she did to me as “normal” and “okay”. It had come to terms with her as “how normal girls act”.
It was seeking her through the media I was consuming. Through the porn I was orgasming to.
Realizing that was like being hit across the knees with a ballbat. I sank into depression for about a month. I became a lot like her-just a shell of a person, walking and doing but not ever being there.
Instead of crawling out, I just fell deeper into myself.
In a weird sort of way though, it led me to talk to other people. Other victims of abuse-guys like me who were into “crazy women”. Some who had gone through the same things I had. In our discussions, it led to us talking about porn as a means of coping with trauma. It was the first time in my life I felt as though I could place a label on what had happened.
Trauma. I’d been through something horrible, and I was still learning to deal. In that light, suddenly all the yandere porn and anime I was watching, it didn’t seem so bad. I didn’t feel like I was broken.
I kept talking to people, to victims of abuse. Some into kinks that weren’t mine, but similar. “Problematic” by mainstream contemporaries. In it all, I found a common string of understanding-the porn, the media we were consuming, it was slowly helping us. Helping us to open up, to talk when we feel our voices were stiffled. Some claimed that their porn habits helped them realize they were still human. Some said it even led to them seeking professional help.
Me personally? It made me realize I wasn’t alone. That I was human, that I still deserved the same love, respect and understanding as anyone. I started to pull myself out of the hole.
I started to patch myself up.
Porn is considered a myriad of things by people both in the profession, and out. The morals of it have been debated endlessly. The longterm effects of it, likewise. I’ve nothing to add to that discussion save this:
If you’re someone using porn as a means of coping, it’s okay. You’re absolutely not alone. You’re not broken because of it. You’re healing, and you will absolutely get better one day. If that means enjoying a certain thing on your favorite site, so be it. You are not a horrible person because of it. You’re a human being.
I started this article by mentioning my partner. I told them all of this just as I told you now.
It was the first time I felt comfortable opening up about my little “eccentric quirk”. The first time my “weeb thing” lead me to telling someone about my stalker, and how I had coped with the aftermath.
They leaned over, looking at that patch on the wall as they wrapped their arms around me. They told me they loved me, and that no one could ever take that away.
I want to extend that sentiment to all of you reading this.
You are loved, you are valued, you are wanted. And nobody-no abuser, no harasser, no dynamic in your life-can pull that away from you.