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 

the naughty side

There’s nothing wrong with a little naughty, with being a little naughty, with indulging in as much naughty as you feel drawn too, with letting the naughty in, often, with letting the naughty out, also often, with giving your naughty total, full and free uninhibited reign.

I do, even though for ages in SL I haven’t let it or let myself do so. I used to, ages back, especially at the beginning, but then I just kind of got involved with other stuff, and then I just found I didn’t have time. Well, now once again I am finding time because once again it feels so, so right too.

 
SL is an escape, as I keep saying, it’s also safe so a perfect place to let your imagination and your impulses off the leash, or on the leash, depending on your thing. So, this is my confession, one which I have no problem with at all, in rediscovering that by calling it sinful actually only makes it all the more exciting, all the more tempting, all the more enticing and a magnet for, well, me among others.

We all have our own motivations for releasing our naughty sides in SL, mine isn’t in any way deep, just simply it’s fun, pleasurable, exciting, and even in some cases a surprising way to meet new people. I’ve even learned a thing or two, or three, which I won’t share here, you just have to find out for yourselves. Online naughtiness is pretty much normalised now anyway.

Some even call it ‘the dark side’, which sometimes and in some cases it probably is, or actually is; but hey, dark and light, one can’t exist without the other.

I know there are those who don’t agree, which is fair enough, each to their own, live and let live and all that. It’s bonkers, for sure, but bonkers is also good fun, a chance to take yourself out of yourself, or let a side of yourself that you’re can’t for whatever reason in RL do. So, I say, go for it!

Let’s get bonkers!  

~ Anan Eebus

 

 

 

 

 

remain seated

 

I'm fascinated by signs in Second Life. They turn up all over the place, sometimes in unlikely places, often telling you the obvious, and like this one, “Remain Seated”, which I would have thought you’re more likely to see on the train itself rather than where I found it, beside the railway tracks.

Where are you supposed to sit? On the tracks? On the sleeper or the rail? And would that really be a good idea, being that when the train comes, well, splat! How frequent are the trains on this track anyway? You could sit there waiting but then you might be waiting hours, or even days, weeks. It would be like inworld camping without the remuneration at the end.

If you were on the train and weren’t looking out of the window at the time of passing the sign then how would you know to remain seated? You’d have to rely on the driver or conductor giving a customer message over the intercom. I wouldn’t hold out for that though, as of all the trains I been on in SL, and I’ve been on a few, I’ve never heard anyone say anything, not even to remain seated, or even “tickets please!”, which would be awkward if they did because I never have a ticket, which means they’d probably throw me off the train while it was moving, whether I was seated or not. Ouch!

They’d think I was a hobo. I wonder where the word comes from, ‘hobo’. I checked and found all kinds of theories, but no one really knows for certain. One idea is it being short for “homeward bound” which sounds sort of plausible but I’m not totally convinced. Other ideas are even flakier. Mine is that it’s come from something like ‘homeless bohemian’, as in someone who lives kind of outside normal society by maybe choosing to have to no home. I’m not sure if this is a new idea or not, but I did come up with on my own.

Anyway, I’m not one, a hobo, so it really doesn’t matter. But I will keep chasing signs for the more intriguing and mysterious ones.

 

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

my SL Flickr Page

Me and my photography in Second Life on Flickr, go see more of me 😎 this is where I post a whole load of SL imagery I find when I'm exploring, and some of me to.

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~ Anan x