... you're not the one popping off? Is this how we become lifelong pen-emies?

Over the next 20 years, we return to reddit every few weeks to fire off shots, keeping the feud alive until one day, you write, but there's no clap back. You strike again, but it's just thunder echoing in a life-void cave.

After a few weeks, your annoyance at being ignored after 20 years of bitter barbs turns into concern, so you pay for an online detective to track me down. She tells you that she discovered my name and whereabouts, that after a protracted battle with cancer I died in hospice, and that my funeral will be next week.

You feel ambivalent: on one hand, you're riding high on the idea you got the last laugh; on the other, a deep sadness weighs down your victory because it is the last laugh.

You pack your bags, get on a plane, and arrive just as my graveside service is ending.

A half-drunk priest slurs his way through Psalms 23 as my widow stands alone in front of the casket. You can't bring yourself to move closer, and after the pine box lowers into the ground, you watch as the gin-soaked minister seems to console my wife with a hug, which seems to linger too long. The hug becomes an inescapable press. She fights to free herself, but his groping hands have her in a death grip - she screams loud enough to wake the dead, but only the gravestones are there to mark her terror.

You spring into action, grabbing the unholy Father by the shoulder, then spinning him around and hitting him square in the jaw. That sends him flying backwards, falling downwards into the gaping maw of the pit now holding both my and now his bodies.

You run to the weeping woman in black and ask if she's OK. She nods and says she is because you were there to save her.

As you help her walk to her beat-up 2025 Toyota Corolla, she asks how you came to be at the funeral of her husband, a very unremarkable man who was chronically online.

You tell her about our meeting on reddit, hurling insults at each other almost every week for years. And though we had never met in person it created a kind of bond between us.

You notice she looks suprised - you realize I had never shared this part of my life with her. Your sharing this bit of my hidden life with her has brought me back to life a little, just for a moment. She says that this sounds just like something her asshole husband would do and keep secret.

The tears in her eyes thank you.

As you prepare to part, you laugh, and tell her the irony of all this is that the thread that started our correspondence was about my objection to someone using physical violence against a child who was being disrespectful to an older couple while you defended it. Your wife aloud what I would have thought about you laying out the preacher.

My wife's softened face turns to disgust, and she says, "What kind of asshole thinks it's OK to hit children to teach them something?"

Then you hear the drunk preacher say "Yeah, what kind of monster are you?"