Essay 2 Rough Draft for Workshop

SkyWaltz’s heart pounded in her chest like a pair of Yagudo beastman drums.  (And so did mine as I shifted my weight in the desk chair.)  She had trained for this moment for weeks (a couple evenings at the keyboard).  She had researched strategies and consulted fellow adventurers (through online forums and an in-game chat system that showed up in shades of purple).  Well-fed with potatoes and crab meat (which boosted her health and defense points), she approached the vortex that would send her to battle with the stony god-beast (Titan Prime, level 25, six levels above SkyWaltz).  Faced with the possibility of her imminent death (and a loss of hard-earned experience points), SkyWaltz reflected on her life. 

Since she had left her hometown of Windurst, SkyWaltz’s home had been a single, unfurnished room in Bastok’s residential district (I always thought the decorating feature was a waste of time and in-game currency).  That suited her just fine because the people who had made her house a home were not there beside her (my mother had passed away from colon cancer two years earlier, in the summer of eighth grade).  But Vana’diel’s brave adventurers were defined by their ability to leave everything from their old lives behind.  Their calling was to explore the wilds; they had no need for nostalgia or grief. 

Because her home was so sparse, however, sometimes SkyWaltz would spend all night in the seaside town of Selbina watching the ships come to harbor (after my dad had gone to bed the computer was all mine).  There, she would eat a dinner of fish drenched in sweet butter (frozen Lean Cuisine meals because neither my dad nor I could cook) and drown out her worries with the sound of local folk melodies (the background noise of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim on the TV).  Sometimes friends would join her (my e-friends and I discussed the deepest things late at night, things I’d never tell my real-life friends at high school).

The only friend at SkyWaltz’s side right now was the benevolent vulpine avatar, Carbuncle, who had first taught her the ways of the Summoner.  The ruby on Carbuncle’s forehead reflected the anxiety of SkyWaltz’s face, the sweat dampening her dark-blue hair.  It was time to face the Titan of Earth, time for the young Taru-Taru to claim dominance over the ethereal giant that shook mountains with its fists.  (“Dad!  Can you get the phone?  I’m in the middle of something!”)  One leap into the void and the fight had begun…

*****

A lot of my family still likes to castigate me for the years I spent addicted to a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game called “Final Fantasy XI Online.”  They say I missed out on so much because I would rush home to play on the computer instead of going out.  I had no life because I was living vicariously through a computer-generated creature with blue hair, a dog-like nose, and pointed ears.  They don’t realize how much that silly game meant to me; they don’t realize that SkyWaltz may very well have saved my life.  Yes, escapism isn’t the healthiest answer to grief, and I know I missed out on things, but none of my relatives was a thirteen-year-old girl without a mother at the time in her life when female guidance matters most.  I turned to a virtual world where I could gain in order to help me cope with the fact that this world was so full of loss.  Who knows what I would have done without such a resource? 

Call it denial, or shock, or an anomaly of bereavement, but I cried more when, after four years of adventuring, my dad finally forced me to delete SkyWaltz than I had at my mother’s funeral.