tricks of treats #10- Hallowmas

 

Hallowmas
where the past
catches up with you,
flaunting
and taunting
haunting your every step
scratching at the truth
tooth and claw
until your skin is raw
oozing from each pore
feeding on your flaws
reading every twitch and tell
and using them against you,

pulling out your roots
tearing at your seams
shredding your defences
poisoning your streams,

feel it brush
against your thoughts,
feel it creep
into your sores,
feel it pouring
acid in your wounds,
too late to be saved
from the things you crave,
careful with that dream
in case no one hears you scream,
can you recall a past
that you hoped would last?

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #9

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #8

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #7

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #6

 © E. Calder

tricks of treats #5

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #4

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #3

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #2

 

© E. Calder

tricks of treats #1

 

© E. Calder

hello Halloween

 

‘Tis that time of year
again, be a-feared
quiver and quake
shiver and shake
the veil between
the seen and unseen
is tearing again
into tatters and shreds
as one world is bled
and seeps into the other
to claim the unclaimed
souls without names
the walking undead,
despairing, the dread,
breathless the screams
unravel from dreams
severed the veins
that trickle, that stain
there’ll be no escape
from this your wake
now all you can do
is wait.

 

pixel pixies

 

Yet another of my favourite shops in SL has closed, land abandoned, sims dissolved. It follows the fate of so many I’ve been fond of over the way too many years I’ve been here, all consigned to the primyards to be disassembled, composted, and one hopes at least eventually to be repurposed as something else and not just rotting away in some sl’andfill.

Then there’s my friends list, my avatar’s and my Bloodlines online profile. All those I’d bitten and all those who’d bitten me, all those still in my clan’s bloodline, of a sorts, where are they now?

As with these, alongside my list of friends, so few are even here anymore, more gone than not, less are active than not, some most likely not logged on for years even if they could remember their passwords, or their names. Their avatars exist now only as ghosts: there and not there, so transparent they can’t be seen at all and yet there they are still lounging in my lists.

That’s life, even Second Life, time and people move on, change, die, my friends list reading more like a memorial to lives past than present, rows upon rows of gravestones overgrown with lichen and ivy, missing presumed. Occasionally one will suddenly appear after years, an IM (instant message), usually sent when I’m offline to be found like a message in a bottle washed up on my shore to be uncorked and read, quite often beginning, “I don’t know if you remember me, but,….”, or a more succinct “I’m back!”, sometimes leaving me scraping my brain as to who they are. I usually remember though, weirdly I’ve always remembered more detail than I would’ve thought, on how we first met, or something particularly notable we did, even if it was only the once. So strange how all we pixel pixies leave an echo however brief the acquaintance may have been, a different kind of byte caught in these memory banks.

I sometimes look through my list and think, I should purge this a bit, tidy up, as I do every now and then with my bulging inventory, which by the way keeps bulging no matter how often I sieve it. It’s actually a shame more of this stuff we accumulate isn’t set as ‘trans’, as in with transfer permissions, because it would be brilliant to be able to do the preloved thing and instead of throwing things away, pass them on. As for my friends list, I’m reluctant delete those names long gone or forgotten or those I haven’t heard from in years, they are people after all. At the end of the day they aren’t just pixel pixies but real people beyond their screens even if they aren’t inworld, so to speak, anymore. 

In a way I’m a carrier of part of their story, even if it’s a part they’ve long left behind.

© Anan Eebus

 

A sense of grief

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

the darker side of death

so many lives
lived and died
so many deaths
lived and died
sleep another sleep

weep another weep
wake from the deep

with relief

or regret

to find

you're still here.

© Anan Eebus

when death comes to play

welcome to the darkness

the eternal forever

when dark

and light

make love

together

 

around the corner

dark liaisons

heaven forbid

out of breath

strange bedfellows

when death comes to play

© Anan Eebus 2019

dead zone

Where do all the avatars go when they’re no longer are here?

I know, I know! Into the dead zone (cue the dramatic music!)

Second Life (SL) is littered with so many phantoms, or what I call fleeters, those who were there once and now not but have left their ghost in names, accounts and avatars which exist and don’t exist at the same time in a limbo. Once upon a time they’d run away to join the circus and then run away from that, the circus being SL, never to be seen again and yet their tantalising breadcrumbs are still to be found going stale.

Second life is becoming a graveyard of empty lives, of echoes, traces, corpses pretty much, the dead existing in name and statistics only on friends lists, on prims, in profiles: are they undead, in a coma, in hibernation, abducted by aliens, avi-napped?!

I know, I know! They’ve moved into Second Unlife, a holding pattern, a waiting room, stasis, perhaps an anteroom to a Second AfterLife. After all, some of them might come back one day though the longer they dn’t the less likely they will, while some most definitely won’t being that they shuffled their mortal coil in the real world leaving no clues as to what should happen to their SL-self, or Slelf, should they have pre-deceased their avatar. These are the spookiest, you know they’re gone and yet. Perhaps this is just like real death in real life (RL) where even though the person is gone they are still here in their photos, their old possessions, image, the things they’ve done, and in the minds and hearts of those closest to them.

SL is perhaps one of the largest graveyards in the virtual world, but without any actual graves, just a few with real names with most being merely facades, macabre playgrounds, impressions.

Fleeters are the lost boys and girls inhabiting a dead zone, a land of echoes, a shadowland consigned to forever do so, suspended on the cusp of a black hole not escaping and yet not vanishing utterly inside to be crushed to nothing.

All these names with no one to claim them, that’s what I’d call an existential crisis.

© 2019 Anan Eebus

once upon a friend

old photo from 2009 of me and Galib dancing at Veiled fang Sanctuary

Gone, gone, so many gone, drifted or died, somewhere still wandering or somewhere laying in stillness gone, gone, gone but not lost but not here, in a neverwhere confined to traces of memory, siftings of remembering. 

How to keep going, breathing the air they can no longer breathe, doing the things they can no longer do, loving the lovers they can no longer love, living the lives they can no longer live, that is the trick, the balancing act, the edge of a reason that sometimes feels so unrelentingly saddening, unfathomably harrowing.

As if one life isn’t enough to be working with some add yet another to the mix and the mess that plays with your mind and cracks your emotions, a second life in Second Life which is and isn’t as real as the real and yet real as it’s real as we make it to be.

So I’m thinking, for better or worse, of a friend, one in particular who long ago now left and then left and then left here forever and never return except in my mind and sometimes in breadcrumbs online, in that world, that second life, that blur that one’s never quite sure what is tangible or just an imaginible. A world that nevertheless craves to be touched, to be felt, to be held for all of its absence, for all of their absence, for all of his absence. Sometimes it’s closer and sometimes it’s not but it’s never so far as to be far out of reach.

His name was Galib and although not a lover he was as close as a friend could be or could be in an unreal world that’s as real as the unreal can be. He died in the real where he simply stopped being although signs of once having been still haunt in photos and name. His footprint remains in pixels and archives of old conversations still stored in a cloud somewhere far, far away and sometimes right overhead; such a strange twist of fate.

How often it happens as much in our second life as in the real and the feelings of loss are as potent in both, far from being deadened by digital detachment. The grief is the same despite the seeming disconnect, where two worlds collide and sometimes with consequences so unexpected and unprepared.  How to share such a loss, with those that don’t understand, to reconcile with the real and unreal when the unreal is real, this other world, this nowhere that’s somewhere so far but always right here.

Away from the keyboards, away from the screens there’s flesh and there’s bone, there’s blood and emotions as warm to the touch, as solid as me and living as you.

Though years ago now I still think of him, the Galib who wasn’t any more a cartoon, animation, line of code, zeroes and ones who logged into being and then just logged out of existence. I remember his hair, raven and wild as dark as the night which suited a vampire as he was and I am, and the walking cane which he was never without and whether was needed I never was sure but was him through and through, his superpower perhaps. He was an expert at fencing and also most notably a rocking guitarist; a sad loss to the music he never got to make. Then was his drinking, for which he made little apology becoming the demon that in the end took him for good.

We never met for real but it feels like we did. How strange are lives lived today between worlds where we are many people but always, always, for better or worse, just you and just me. 

© 2018 Anan Eebus