here & after

So, Halloween is over and the cracks between the hereworld and the afterworld have sealed once more. Or have they? 

Do you feel the ripples, the tremors, a brush of fingers across your cheek, a tap on your shoulder, a breath from out of thin, frosty air? 
Did you hear the whispers from disembodied voices, a bump, creaking, a scratching, footsteps? Did you feel a shiver coursing through your flesh, creep along your bones, curdle your thoughts?
Did your heart stop beating for longer than it should?

So, All Hallows has once again been lost to the avarice of time to sleep a deeper winter-fed sleep, beyond the flicker, beyond the living, beyond the dying, to surrender, submit, be subsumed, be consumed, be entombed.

Light is lost to dark.

I find myself wandering shadowy corners of this second life, invited in at every turn to find more than meets the eye. I walk in wary expectation, anticipation, looking every which way for what may be lurking, stalking, what may be waiting, lingering, what may be hungering, thirsting, for just such the likes of me to, in all innocence, wander past.

The longer nights draw out apprehension, percolating fear from every pore. At any moment  something, anything, could come forth, exude, weep from unbeknownst slumbers and grab me by the ankles, wrap itself around me, cling to my clothes and skin, peel away all semblance of self and will and resistance, beckon me to crumble, to surrender, submit, be subsumed, be consumed, be entombed.

“Give up, give up, you know you want too, give in, give in, and follow your desires, give way, give way, let you whole self crumble, mind, body and soul.”

… this is what they say, bewildering me, but not in words I recognise, a feeling unearthed, disinterred.

Wintertide’s a time of not just receiving, but giving, and I must give, give, give, more and more and more, let the season feed on all my emotions, let the winterland grasp me ever closer into its embrace. Give, give, give, a hunger that won’t easily be sated. I’ll fall, let myself fall, taken and awakened. I become an offering for others to receive. It’s what I really need, they say, despite my nervous uncertainly. 

Yuletide, Advent, Solstice, Christmas, all that’s holy, all that’s pagan, all that is unholy residing and colliding within me and without.

Don’t be fooled by baubles, tinsel, dancing lights, all the temptations of the long night. Although, I may not have a choice, I do not have a choice, choices made long before I was even born. All paths lead to the same point of origin with an unerring yearning that’s long been impossible to refuse.

© Anan Eebus 

no words

 

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

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

winterlines

           I love winter. 
            It’s the darkness, the long dark nights when I can hide, not be seen, pretend the rest of the world is far, far, far away or maybe doesn’t exist at all. In its absence it offers so much, it’s an absence of light but a presence of temptations that dare not come out during the day for being ostracized or bullied.
            A time when shadows are no longer distinguishable from not-shadows, when there are merged or swallowed up by the all-encompassing, as I feel I am when night comes in tracking across my skin, darkening me, reshaping me, remaking me. Every night I feel I’m being rearranged and during the winter there’s longer time for this indulgence to be indulged.
            The sun’s very lethargic during winter, almost to the point of ailing.  Or is it saving it’s energy for longer days?  Even the sun needs a rest after all the work it’s done during the spring, summer and to some extent even autumn, it has to take its toll a little bit and leave it feeling more than a little weary, weather-worn, ragged around the edges.  Hence winter, a time for it to take the time for itself leaving us to our own devices largely, leaving us to face the dark for longer and longer, encouraging us not to ignore that side, the darker side, our negative.  Colourless it may seem but rich in shades and subtlety that light can only dream of and rest on its laurels of spectrum overload to make up for what it lacks in tone.
            The winter embraces, draws me in with offering and often comes through with its tantalizing treats.  Moods are different in the winter. They become secretive, some become agitated, some tetchy, but others become reflective as though looking into the pitch dark lets is see so much more than the exposed glare of a midsummer’s day.
            Others abound also during this time. The normally hidden, forgotten, ignored, rejected, things discarded as myth, as imaginings, hallucinations.  These things exist but need the right conditions to feed and thrive, conditions that winter offers in abundance.  An uneasy balance is struck between unlikely alliances during these forbidden, and for some forbidding, months, the world beyond, or even worlds beyond, are never very far away and the fabric between so thin that merely brushing against it could cause a tear through whose frayed edges nocturnal natures may seep.
             I love the winter, precariously-balanced on the edge of the year.
  © Anan Eebus (16th January 2018)