Years later, an intern at SVT found the recorded broadcasts of Joel, and posted them on filmtavlan.se, a popular television discussion forum. They hadn't managed to collect all the broadcasts, and many of the earlier ones had been lost to time entirely-but this was still the first we all had seen of Joel since his last public broadcast. Many of us discussed how we told ourselves it hadn't happened in the first place-but seeing the irrefutable proof, and feeling those childhood memories again, brought back all the same energy as those schoolyard Friday discussions.
The public forum also allowed for many others to pitch in their theories. Some swore they had heard him while working in the loop, but were told they couldn't go to find him. Others theorized that he had been brought to a different loop entirely. Some even thought that, between different broadcasts, we were seeing a selection of different Joels. Differences in the backdrop, his demeanour, and his language all seemed to support this.
It didn't take much time for Joel to become an internet folktale. For everyone who had actually seen the broadcasts in childhood, there were a dozen more who claimed they had, and were too eager to add their own false memories. Joel reached a small occult status on filmtavlan. Edits of the recovered broadcasts, distorted edits of Joel from school photos, and written accounts of seeing Joel that were entirely fabricated dominated the forums. Some tried to find connections with the songs he occasionally played, posing some thematic significance. After some time, our own memories of Joel became distorted and muddied. He was no longer himself-just a childhood schoolyard myth, an internet scary story, a cocktail of truth and fiction centered around a person that, perhaps, never was.
We never got any real closure. Still, discussing Joel with others on filmtavlan was a way to connect to our own childhood. I reconnected with friends I hadn't seen since graduating high school, even more who had moved from Munsö or Sweden entirely. Remembering Joel couldn't have ever brought him back, but I think he would have liked knowing he had his friends together, again.