Break The Internet

My life started the day Twenty One Pilots asked me if I was still sleeping.

I opened up my email account that morning, only to find a gif of a half-open yellow eye. At first, I was excited. Maybe Twenty One Pilots is finally coming back from their hiatus, I thought as I closed the email and went to Twitter to see what everyone else thought of the mysterious email.

As it turned out, I was late to the party. By the time I logged on, everyone was already talking about the email and exchanging theories. Even my own fans had stopped talking about Pray For The Wicked just to speculate over when Twenty One Pilots was releasing new music. Had the world gone mad?

After I was done searching through my feed, I saw that I had received a DM. A small part of me hoped that it was from a particular ex-guitarist of Panic! At The Disco, but I knew that was unlikely. I hadn't even talked to him in years.

The DM turned out to be from Josh Dun. "Hey Brendon!" the message read. "I listened to your new album, and I really like it."

I was furious. Josh just had to rub it into my face that everyone on the Internet was talking about his band, and nobody cared about Pray For The Wicked anymore. I would prove to him that I was taking back the crown. "I'm Dun with you," I typed, and then sent to Josh. That would show him who was better once and for all.

Josh replied almost immediately. "Never heard that one before," he wrote. "What's up with you today, Brendon?"

I didn't even bother to reply. Instead, I returned to my feed and spotted a brief conversation between two of my fans about Twenty One Pilots.

@silktietourniquet - did you see the top email???

@beebofangirl - omg who hasn't i think they broke the internet

I knew better. Twenty One Pilots hadn't broke the Internet, but the war had begun. I would break the Internet long before Twenty One Pilots ever had the chance to, and I knew just how I would do it.

A few hours later, I was in the midst of an interview with Paper when the conversation turned to Ryan Ross. "Was it a huge personal hit when Ryan left?" the interviewer, a woman named Beatrice, asked, and for a moment, I was tempted to tell her the truth. I could finally let out everything that had been on my chest since Ryan left - how he had broken my heart - and surely, that would break the Internet.

Something stopped me. I couldn't just tell this stranger about how I had loved Ryan for two miraculous years, or how he had left me in Cape Town. There had to be a way to break the Internet without letting go of my deepest secret. "No," I told Beatrice. "It had been happening for a while."

The interview continued on, but Beatrice just kept asking me about Ryan. "He was such a heartthrob in his own right," she said, and I couldn't help but agree, leading me to comment about how adorable it was that fans still shipped us together. Maybe that would be enough to divert some of the Internet's attention away from Twenty One Pilots.

"You also don't buy into the old masculinity tropes," Beatrice said later, and I knew that this was my chance. If I couldn't break the Internet by hinting at the truth behind Panic! At The Disco's split, then maybe I could if I finally came out.

"No. I'm married to a woman and I'm very much in love with her but I'm not opposed to a man because to me, I like a person," I said. "Yeah I guess you could qualify me as pansexual because I really don't care. If a person is great, then a person is great. I just like good people, if your heart's in the right place. I'm definitely attracted to men. It's just people that I am attracted to."

"So you're pansexual," Beatrice said.

"I guess so," I said. "I guess this is me coming out as pansexual."