I could maybe trace it back to when he was three or four years old, when he ate chocolate ice cream in the messiest way possible, spreading it all over his face, and I’d dry heave and scream, “Mom! Tell Ryon to eat neater!” and then he’d smear it even BIGGER, right up to his eyebrows. Or it might be the time when he was ten, when I wanted to watch a miniseries about Anastasia, the maybe-not-murdered Russian princess, on our only TV. He wanted to watch Monster Truck Racing. My mom wasn’t home to arbitrate, so he forced me to try to strangle him with a phone cord.
Either of those incidents could have been what separated us emotionally. I’ll talk to a therapist about it and get back to you. We loved gaming together, but that was about it. We kind of just EXISTED with each other. I regret that, because if we’d supported each other more, I think we could have been more secure in our respective weirdness when we finally encountered the real world (which was WAY later than it should have been because we were homeschooled). The fact he was reaching out to me to play an online video game together was flattering. I jumped at the chance.
BUT A TINY CAUTIOUS LITTLE JUMP.
Because I didn’t know much about this Warcraft thing, but I did know that anything online with other people in a “game form” could be potentially hazardous to my time-health. The previous year, I’d developed a slight addiction to another online game called Puzzle Pirates. It was brilliant in its design, AND you got to customize your character, who was a pirate. In all categories, it was a four-hour-a-day winner.
The tasks in the game were simple but fun puzzles. There was a carpentry puzzle (like Tetris), there was a sailing puzzle (a variation on Tetris), and about three other puzzles with . . . Tetris-like qualities.
There were overall goals, too. The better you played, the faster your ship ran. The faster your ship ran, the more stuff you gathered. The more stuff you gathered, the more money you earned. The more money you earned, the cuter the outfit you could buy, and the cuter the outfit . . . well, that was a basic end goal. The outfits.
I was KILLER at running my pirate ship, particularly with the navigation (quasi-Tetris-like) puzzle. I mean, savant level, guys. And after a few months of playing, I impressed enough people to make a lot of in-game friends, and we banded together to form a regular “crew.” It became the people, not the clothes, that kept me logging online day after day as we sailed the virtual seas.
Both of my closest friends in the game were stay-at-home moms. “Ploppyteets” had just had her first baby, and you could tell from her attitude, she did NOT know what she was getting into with the whole “Shoving a human out of the bio-oven.” She’d type things like, “Sorry, have to leave. This baby wants to rip my tits off all day.” I never figured out much about her personal life, but I pictured her in a trailer park in Nevada, breast-feeding as she solved puzzles and smoked cigarettes, ashes dripping on the infant’s forehead.
The other mom we’ll call “LadyLee.” She had a newborn and a two-year-old, and her husband traveled a lot. LadyLee seemed like the kind of woman who was pretty and sweet but unhappy in her marriage. She had gained a ton of weight after her last child and was depressed all the time, so she didn’t leave the house. Ever. Real American Dream story. Instead of worrying about herself, LadyLee would counsel people in the crew about their love lives, their schoolwork, anything they needed, all through the game’s chat interface. She was always there and sweetly comforting, like an AI big sister.
There was one incident where I got a job on Days of Our Lives, and afterwards, the producer called my manager up and said, “We will never hire this girl again.” I had exactly five words in the episode, and I couldn’t figure out how I screwed them up so badly. I kept having panic attacks in my sleep, reliving the single line, “My princess, how are you?” over and over in my head, as if somehow it could un-ruin my career. LadyLee was the only person in my life who could get me to laugh about how stupid the whole thing was.
“Oh, was that the scene with Sami? She had an affair with her brother-in-law Tom, and then he murdered his own brother, which caused her to be committed to a mental hospital and meet another woman who was MARRIED to Tom, and then they broke out together and got revenge on Tom by ruining his shipping business. They probably didn’t like your nose.”
Then LadyLee bought me a new Pirate hat in-game, which had a feather in it and REALLY looked good with my character’s hair design, and suddenly I was weeping onto the keyboard, typing, “Thank u, life saver. <3.”
She was a yar pirate friend. So it was sad when things went off the rails SO BADLY for her.
A new guy, “TreeMaster,” joined the crew a few months in, and he and LadyLee started chatting with each other privately. A LOT. I’d load cannons (in a PINBALL Tetris-like game) and gossip with Ploppyteets about the Lee-Tree relationship.
“Are they on her ship together in private chat again?!”
“Uh-huh. Wow, my kid is a crap fountain, how do you plug them up? There’s no manual with this thing.”
Things escalated, LadyLee and TreeMaster bought a ship together (hello, virtual commitment!), and I could sense something was going too far between them. I tried to caution her.
“You and TreeMaster are hanging out a lot, is that a good idea, Lee?”