Yours Truly, Me (Troyler)

✉️Epilogue✉️

Dear Tyler,

I'd never imagined myself writing another one of these, yet here I am.

Um, it's been a while, hasn't it? Sixty-two or so years, actually. And a lot has happened during that time, so much that I can't even fathom the idea of summing it all up in one little letter.

But I'm going to try. Because according to the doctors, I'm probably going to forget a lot of it soon.

And you're not here to help me remember anymore.

Okay, to begin: my name is Troye Sivan Mellet. I'm a couple of months away from turning eighty years old. I - we - have two children, both adopted (obviously), and three grandchildren (all of which belong to only our older daughter, Lucy, and her husband). My older brother, Steele, had died a few years ago, whereas Sage and Tyde are both still here with beautiful families and lives of their own.

Your name is Tyler. Tyler Oakley, to be exact.

A name that's hardly forgotten by anyone who happened to have the privilege of knowing you, but, by cruel fate, might just be erased from my memory completely.

You were a lot of things, Tyler. A son, brother, friend, boyfriend-to-be-husband-later-on, father, grandfather, YouTuber, LGBT+ rights advocate, Trevor Project board member, author, the list goes on. To a lot of people, you'd played an important role in their life, and the biggest things you've done - such as raising millions of dollars for the Trevor Project - to the smallest things about you - such as your laugh, which was always so full of life - you won't be forgotten.

And I don't mean to be narcissistic here, but I like to think that you played an especially important part of my life.

No one else knows how we really got together, back when I was still writing to you, and it's just as well; anyone who knew would probably think we were lying, in all honesty. I mean, I literally wrote you fan letters for two years. And they weren't really even fan letters, but just whatever I'd happened to be thinking about at the time, writing out my innermost thoughts, my deepest secrets, all of it, and sending it to a near stranger.

Not to mention the fact that you never even knew I was the one behind them, for another two years. And even then, this didn't happen until we'd started emailing each other (I was still under anonymity) and seeing each other at different YouTuber rendezvous points. All that time, I'd been talking to you, baring my soul and learning about you, yet you never even knew you were talking to me, not until I revealed it in one of my YouTube videos with the classic ending line of all of the letters.

"Yours truly, me, am I right?"

Of course, you'd caught it right away. How could you not, after seventy-five letters, and God knows how many emails, signed with the same damned line every single time? It was a dead giveaway, and you knew it.

The month after that, when I cut off all contact do to embarrassment, and practically ran away, traveling around the world with no set goal in mind, was one of the lower times of my life; however, I barely even remember it, in comparison to when we accidentally ran into each other in LA.

I still remember that day. I remember me, just innocently drinking my coffee in some random Starbucks, and you, with your hair giving you away in the middle of the crowd of pedestrians. I remember, doing what I could to sneak away, and you screaming my name when you saw me. I even remember running away from you, all of the fear and humiliation of everything that'd happened catching up on me, and feel like laughing out how idiotic it was to even think that you were mad at me.