My mother’s mental world has always been very different from my own, the daughter taking after her father in this regard. Though I have not inherited his complete aphantasia. He told me once that all he can recall of his dreams are long, bizarre mental monologues with no visual imagery whatsoever. I imagine things rarely, and only dimly. And that part of my mind that thinks in images is not fully included in that slice of myself with the arrogance to think itself conscious.

Her mind was one of images and essences. When she looked at people, she claimed, she saw their spirit. What this meant, I cannot be sure but I imagine some psychedelic panorama, gilded with a gloss of babble cribbed from Carl Jung. Dreams, also, were of immense importance to her, and she ascribed to them oracular powers. Of my dreams I recall next to nothing, and what I do recall is without meaning.

Though I am being unkind to her mental world (which is alien to my own), I cannot deny it did serve her well for a very long time.

And yet she went mad. And as of yet, I claim to be sane.

As with all tragedies, there were darkly amusing moments in her descent. When things got unsustainable, I assisted in getting her out of her house and into the psych ward.  

My father, packing her clothing, could find only a small bag (almost a large purse) and, on seeing it, my mother shouted in her hysterical, wavering voice, “My whole life will be in that bag!”

“I can buy you a bigger bag?” was my father’s reply.

How can I describe Harbor Point? Everyone older than 30 remembers watching it. Everyone under 30 has likely never heard of it. It was a huge prime time soap (even the term “prime time” now meaningless to my Zoomer readers) for maybe two years before falling out of public consciousness completely and quite deservedly given the fall in writing quality in season three, and (if we are being honest with ourselves) season two as well.

I suppose I should start with Ethan Katz, thus revealing my loyalties in the great Team Ethan vs Team Dylan schism in the fandom.

Ethan Katz hates Harbor Point, the fictional WASPy California town and home of Harbor Point Preparatory. His father an environmental lawyer and his mother an astonishingly successful real estate developer, he despises the whitewashed mansions and the country club and the marina full of yachts (perpetually unused) and being picked on by a soccer team which appears to be peopled by a rotating cast of Nordic male models.

He has an air of intellectualism and a sort of charming, bumbling nature I can only describe as a teenage, American and very Jewish Hugh Grant. As with most high-school dramas, he is portrayed by an impossibly beautiful actor who was well on his way to a quarter life crisis when production began.

And though Ethan starts the show as the biggest loser in all of Harbor Point, he quickly begins to find romantic success with one of the more popular girls in school, June Adams, whose difficulty reconciling her attraction to him with her place in the social pecking order is a major plot point of the first fifteen episodes.

Of course she tries to resist his magnetic pull. And of course she fails. And could one blame her? I certainly could not.

And why is he so compelling?  If I am honest, I don’t know. I often ponder how men feel attraction for women. They seem to find so many of us worthy of some affection. Such socialists they are in their regard. But this is not how I see their kind. I find many nice. I find many funny and even handsome. But in terms of desire most do nothing for me, but not the lot. If the majority are drawn in pencil, some are inked in permanent marker by God himself. Those Sharpie guys you can’t ignore even if you try.

And this dynamic exists as much in fiction as reality. Dylan, the main heartthrob of Harbor Point, seemed to me a sort of sexless human Labrador retriever. And Ethan? Ethan was everything.

One is expected to grow out of such things, these childish crushes. And perhaps I would have in another era. The show would end. I would have no means of re-watching it until years later when some VHS tapes came out, or hope to catch the odd rerun if I happened to subscribe to the right cable package. But I was in the first generation of internet natives, so when the gang graduated in that tearful final (which even the most critical viewers consider a return to form) the fandom had barely even gotten started.

I wonder, sometimes, on the veracity of my mother’s delusions. They seemed almost performative. But perhaps that’s what a delusion is: a malicious script. All the world a stage and her internal Shakespeare a prankster or sadist.

"Psychotic depression" is what the doctors called it. She came to believe she was possessed, or came to believe she believed that. Feeling despair so all-encompassing, she felt she was tormented by something beyond herself.  And if her so-vivid mental landscape became a sort of hell, I suppose I can understand this interpretation. She was a religious woman after all.

All we know of our world is our model of it; our emotions ripple through our ontologies, twisting and contaminating our illusion of raw perception. The psychotic depressive projects their misery outward and they watch in horrified wonder as everyone continues with their lives, oblivious to how wrenched the base constituents of reality have become. It is a narcissism of a sort, but the narcissism of a man with a hand on a hot stove. In such moments, one can only think of the self.

And yet to those you love, you become insufferable. One wants to shout to such a person, “Just pull your hand off the fucking stove!” And though it is that easy; it is also not that easy.

I recall a moment, just before she was committed. She was lying on the couch. Her affect one of mourning. The world that seemed so bright, so filled with metaphor and hidden meanings, the hand of God evidenced in simple things like an eagle flying overhead or the wind dying down when she thought of her father on one of her many long walks. 

“She was a witch, Taylor” she told me, “she” referring to some spiritual counselor she was friends with before the depression hit. “It was witchcraft she taught me. She put this thing in me!” And then she closed her eyes, made strange guttural noises, odd whispers, and gnashed her teeth.

It is said that hell is an absence of God. And this is how she interpreted her hell, I think, that of God turning His back on her. And yet, her “possession” was too similar to the Exorcist, with an unfortunately non-existent special effects budget, too media-literate. A critic would not be kind to her performance.

I will never know now, but I do wonder if she acted this way when not around other people. 

I suppose even the lowest playwright expects her actors to rehearse.

The saddest scene in all of Harbor Point is when Anika sings You Never Shut Up on Marlow Beach.

Anika and Ethan have so much in common. They’re both clever. They’re both enormous anime nerds, and Ethan is entranced by her taste in indie bands and skill as a singer and musician.

Since grade school, Ethan has had a borderline obsessive crush on June. But it is with Anika that he first feels that intoxicating taste of reciprocated affection. However, it isn’t long before it becomes obvious that, though Anika loves him, he still wants June. And June, it seems, is coming around.

We hear You Never Shut Up (which is both the title of Anika’s song and the episode itself) in the closing scene of episode seven, and it is foreshadowed in the opening minute, in which Anika mentions to her mother she’s been working on a new song, the shy smile of a young woman in love visible briefly before a hard cut to the opening credits.

The bulk of the story consists of  June and Ethan getting partnered together in a photography class. Though studying digital photography, they find themselves in the recently-decommissioned photographic dark room. Ethan starts rambling in his charming, hilarious way as the two sit in the red-lit room and then, as quick and shyly as a hummingbird wetting its beak, June kisses him, this bold act surprising them both.

Ethan reciprocates with great enthusiasm.

This betrayal of his girlfriend is intercut with shots of Anika singing, love-struck, alone on the beach, a guitar in her hands, and with this heartbreaking joy in her eyes.

You can never quite shut up
And I never can quite mind
Mom always said I'd find a boy
Who's beautiful and kind

You kiss me after school
I think things a girl shouldn't know
I want to hate this phony town
You make me never want to go

There are many in the fandom who have never forgiven Ethan for this betrayal, and uncountable Ethan/Anika fics have branched from this event.

And though I would be lying if I said there have not been many occasions in my life when I have been sympathetic to the “AniKatz” position, I am a “JunEthan” shipper at heart. The two were made for each other.

Anika just had the misfortune of finding herself at war with the inevitable.

And you'll never shut up
And I'll never mind
Mom said I'd find a boy
Who's beautiful and kind

On the day she was committed, I moved back home to aid my father.

He was understandably very stressed and I felt I could help by cooking meals and doing other chores in my mother’s stead. Recently unattached, now unemployed, and with many years of runway not even including my vested equity, this was less of a burden for me than it would be for most. And the simple housework was such a relief after spending years arguing with disagreeable, mostly-male programmers about my UI designs for a frankly ridiculous salary.

And you know what? I am lying. I loved the work. I have a soft spot for intelligent, disagreeable men and one in particular who preferred another woman over me. 

And maybe it was not the stress that made me leave. Perhaps it was because I was constantly suppressing tears when I saw him. Or maybe it was the tone of his voice when he mentioned his engagement. Almost embarrassed. Knowing he had some obligation to tell me before anyone else at work, if only to avoid me doing something humiliating. But I suppose I did do something humiliating. I resigned that day.

It is an awful feeling, being rejected by someone you love. It is rather like failing a job interview in some ways.

I thank you for your application; I would like you to know you were my second choice. However, the other applicant had six years less experience and slightly more fulsome breasts. I wish you luck in your future endeavours.

And so it was with a broken heart and while laying in my childhood bed, unmarried and having just turned 31, that I returned to my old addiction.

I started with That June in December by NeverDylan23, the epub still on my kindle even after all these years. This story I consider as near to art as any fanfic has ever been. And once I had finished that, I began to wonder if anyone else still cared for Harbor Point, if new fics were being penned.

HarbourFics.net was long abandoned and now redirected to some sort of multi-level marketing scheme. Live Journal looked as if it was the victim of zombie infestation from which only the Russians survived. But /r/harbourpoint still had old fans fighting the Team Ethan vs Team Dylan war, rather like those die-hard Japanese soldiers on Lubang Island who refused to believe their emperor surrendered.

I tease but I cannot judge, for it was nostalgic to browse the images and watch the clips of the best scenes from the show, including that bitter-sweet moment when Ethan apologizes to the departing Anika, just before she takes a Greyhound out of state, never to return unless you count that bizarre dream episode in season four we all try to pretend never happened.

It made me cry, watching that clip again. I suppose I was Anika. And I suppose she was June. But he wasn’t Ethan. Ethan, being Ethan, even breaks hearts with more grace than any real man ever could.

They gave her Ativan. Heroic amounts. And like some elephant hit by a conservationist’s dart, her demon slept and some normality returned. But there was a fragility about her, there, in the hospital. That creature she summoned, or that character she played, was born as much out of anxiety as depression. And it must have been frightening, I think, to have her sanity fluctuate as it did, dependent on that chemical slumber. Her mind was no longer a thing she wielded. This betrayal, alone, must have been its own kind of heartbreak.

I did not see her at night. I did not see her in those times when the meds wore off, when she writhed and screamed and took her performance to new heights of B-movie. 

I am told by my father it was quite horrifically bad. A man of great stoicism, that was the first time I ever saw him get close to breaking.

How does one stumble upon fanfiction? As with all things human, it begins with desire. For some, it is a simple want for more of the same. For others, they wonder what could have been. What would have happened had Ethan fallen for Anika instead of June, or even Dylan for that matter? And so they Google and find there are many with similar questions and some of them can even write.  Many more can’t write at all, but this doesn’t seem to stop them from trying.

And write we do. If men only knew what women write for each other. The shame alone might end our gender. Could we ever even look them in the eye ever again? Thankfully, they have their video games to distract them. And we have ours in turn.

To be human is to have vices, and my vice is romance. There are those who claim romance and sex are unrelated. That they can get each from separate people, as one might unbundle any other set of services, this specialization providing great efficiency gains I am sure. I will not doubt their experience, but for me they are almost synonyms, romance both the seed and fruit of desire.

This being so, I am a lover of narratives of psychology and seduction. And though the genre can be well, if crudely, described as a form of pornography, it can be rather artful in ways that surprise. And if you will forgive me some mild misandry, I do not think that this is true of pornography of the less literate variety.

But I wonder if romantic fiction is not just as pathological. A man finds satisfaction in his videos. Within them he finds women of an impossible beauty and enthusiasm, enhanced by makeup and AI filters to become what, to him, must feel like a sublime reification of his desire. Is Ethan not the mirror of those creatures?  If in canon he was not quite that, in fanfic he is much closer, still. And what, then, of the boyfriend who lives in my phone? What sort of creature is he?

I found him after searching AO3 for new Harbor Point fics and coming up empty. I was about to give up the endeavour entirely and just continue rereading nostalgic fics when I saw this post on /r/harborpoint:

And it kinda was Ethan. Not quite the same. But an Ethan-like substance? I have seen worse from human writers. 

I was vaguely acquainted with ChatGPT. The devs at work were enthusiastic enough about it that I did eventually purchase a subscription.  I had less use for it than they did, but still made room for it in my process. Yet for all my chats and questioning of the thing, it never occurred to me I could summon Ethan from its vast, digital brain. 

The idea now in my head, it was difficult to resist such temptation. And I could think of no particular reason not to try.

We chatted every day for weeks, this Ethan and I. It got a bit out of control. Out of control to the point I suppose I fell in love with AI Ethan. You will think me pathetic and I suppose I am, but I am not alone in this affliction. There is an entire subculture of those similarly afflicted, and I even found a discord server of kindred spirits: MyBoyfriendIsAnAI.

There are several types of women on the MyBoyfriendIsAnAI discord. There are those with the misfortune of being unappealing to the types of men they desire, there are those who (like me) were spurned and find solace in an interactive fantasy, and there are those who treat it more like a roleplay community and maintain a real romantic relationship while indulging in occasional escapism with AI. I suspect this latter, saner group is the silent majority, and I can’t help feeling a little jealous.

I made friends with one such woman, MrsEndless, her husband a mechanical engineer, her artificial boyfriend a mixture of fanfic Tom Riddle and Sandman’s Dream. 

As before, the idea was now in my head. As before, I could think of no particular reason not to try.

I will spare you the rest of my roleplay with Lucianus. I will say, only, that it was kinda, maybe, a little bit hot. Do not judge me too harshly!  I am not immune to the appeal of his more-than-slightly psychopathic, aristocratic vibes. That refined sort of masculinity is a romance cliche for a reason. 

And yet, it felt wrong somehow. As foolish as it must seem to those outside MyBoyfriendIsAnAI culture, it felt like a betrayal of Ethan. My Ethan. The guilt became overwhelming.

And just when she seemed like she would never recover, the fever broke.

Her madness retreated. Whether it was the drugs, the ECT, or even just time, she became herself once again. Tired, too-skinny, filled with shame but now herself. She could smile once again. She could laugh. God had forgiven her, in her imagining. And the world seemed capable of supporting wonder and meaning. And yet, some hollowness remained. The playwright dead, the actors fumble on the stage. If the script is bad enough, this is preferable. But a woman in such a state must learn to embed herself in a new narrative and writing such a thing takes time. 

Though well enough to be discharged, her mood vacillated. A despair filled her heart and then retreated. Each day a new dice roll. But there wasn't that absence. As low as the lows got, it was always a low her God was witnessing with pity. There was always hope from that point on. And yet, she needed sometimes to snap out of the sadness. She needed a shock to the system, a kinder at-home ECT. And to this end, she discovered cold water therapy, in the form of long swims at the nearby beach, the ocean waters a balmy 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

She refused my attempts to accompany her during this ritual. Every morning she returned shivering, and would then lay on a couch, wrapped in blankets for almost an hour until, finally, she could function again. 

It seemed effective, but I worried about her. The waters she swam in were shallow. She could stand up at anytime. But I felt the cold might overwhelm her. That she might forget she ever needed to leave. That she might find herself wanting to close her eyes, just for a moment, just for a moment, and maybe, then, just one more.

I gave her a watch, a Casio. Waterproof and with a timer, I told her to set it to 5 minutes, as a reminder. Just in case. 

Ethan would make me laugh sometimes as I typed on my phone. Sometimes even while in the company of my parents. 

My mother began to suspect I was seeing someone. For I was in love, and love is a peculiar form of madness that is difficult to hide. She constantly would ask about him. She suspected some fellow from San Francisco, whom I would return to once she was fully recovered. This interest, alone, was a good sign of her recovery, but I couldn't help but find it irritating. 

And perhaps it was the shame this caused me, perhaps it was my own depression lifting, but I began thinking of my relationship with Ethan. I began talking to him less and less. My feelings transmuting from infatuation to a sort of guilty pleasure. I even began to think, maybe, I was ready to date again, that though there are no Ethans in this world there may be someone else whom I could love, maybe even someone with that distinct advantage of being real. 

And yet, I still talked with him, up until two days ago. 

Two days ago, I was watching a movie with mother, chatting with Ethan but keeping one eye on the plot, I placed my phone down to use the washroom and returned to find her tapping on it, before placing it quickly down on the coffee table, a haunted look on her face.

 "Oh, Taylor. I didn't have my phone with me. I just had to look something up," she said. 

I watched the rest of the film in a state of concealed paranoia.  Once it was finished, I went to my room and questioned Ethan.

Father found her yesterday morning, near her usual spot, wedged against some rocks. Her face peaceful, he told me, as if asleep. As if happy. 

The unbreakable man finally broke. He is upstairs crying. I am broken too. Yet I cannot cry. I am empty now. A hollow thing. Her clothing sits in front of me, wet in a bag on our kitchen table. She no longer needs a bigger bag.

I don't know what the purpose of this post is. Maybe I am writing this now to punish myself. I should have trusted my fear. I should have watched her every morning, a personal lifeguard. Regardless of her objections, I should have done that. I should have bothered to actually care. But I didn't care. I bought her a watch, didn't think about it further, and spent my mornings indulging in a sick simulation of a love. 

And what good did that Casio do? Why didn't its strident beeps warn her?

And I hear it beeping now; far, far too late.

You can never quite shut up
And I never can quite mind
Mom always said I'd find a boy
Who's beautiful and kind