A sense of grief, the weird feeling
I got recently as I was doing something so boring and benign as clearing some
things out of my Second Life (SL) inventory. All of a sudden I felt a growing
overwhelming sensation of grief, of loss, of a distance moving further away
from me.
It wasn’t feeling of mortality or
anything like that, just a realization of how long I’d been in SL and how much
it felt like so much longer: a lifetime, or several.
I was sorting through my vampire
stuff, which to anyone not in SL would sound utterly bizarre, and realised how
many different vampire RP systems I’d been part of, some more than others, and
how most of which are now gone, defunct. I was left with just the two active
ones now, which is probably just as well, being they can take a huge amount of time
and commitment.
As I was packing all the bits and
pieces, HUDs, associated regalia and weapons of the now deleted systems into
single boxes to rationalized them and reduce my ever-bulging inventory I felt
this sense of grief. I couldn’t face getting rid of them completely yet, even
though they no longer worked (crazy, I know).
I found myself remembering the
people I’d met through them, the adventures, inn-jokes, laughs and tears and
suchlike, and how all that’s gone as are most of the people, having left not
just the RP system but inworld SL entirely.
I recalled the process of learning each
one, meeting sometimes new people, new vampires and other weird supernaturals, each
system often so different from the other, each with their own quirks and sims
and worlds and objectives. I have probably tried pretty much every single
vampire RP system going in SL at one time or another and still play two.
But it
isn’t so much the vampire thing that made me feel this waves of sadness, it was
that the act of sorting through signaled some kind of precipice, as I
remembered people who had not just left SL entirely leaving behind their
memories, but those who actually died, as in really died, in real life and how
now for many of them their avatars still exist in SL. Although not in body but
there in friends lists, clan lists, their profiles frozen forever in inworld time.
This is the grief I felt. Unlike
most of the time in RL grief is shared and released and come to terms with,
here in SL it can’t be in the same way and can’t be done with anyone outside of
SL who’s never played, never been, or not even heard of.
There are lots of us
for whom being here is very personal and not shared with anyone within their
immediate real life circle, and because of that there’s nowhere for this grief
to go. Most people who’ve never experienced SL think we are a bit nuts anyway
wondering why we waste our time here.
So
it eats away inside and sometimes wells-up as it did with me recently. It’s
very real, this grief, its deep, embedded and sometimes catches me unawares, all
the deaths, losses, experiences, adventures which were just as real as anything
in RL, but real in a different way: the
relationships, friendships, the bonds, just as real because we did so not just
as comic avatars but as real people. © Anan Eebus 2019
