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

 

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