Second Life

A few months ago, in an effort to distract myself from the duties of writing, I subscribed to and paid for an online game. Long ago, I was a big gamer, seeing as sitting at a keyboard or in front of a television screen demanded much less than taking the twelve steps to the front door, going outside, and having to move around. The game was exciting at first, more advanced and in-depth than anything I’d played before, and a welcome distraction from my day-to-day life: the forty-hour-a-week job, the distant nagging of a blank document screen on my computer, and the uneventfulness of my normal routines. I would sit and play for hours, like the loser I was. My back would sag like the top of a question mark, while my feet would scrape parallel ruts into the carpet beneath my desk.

When my father would step into my room to talk to me, I would turn to him, sluggish, as if I’d just been yanked out of a darkness, and onto my lethargic living, breathing world a harsh light had been thrown. I was embarrassed. Not the kind of embarrassed that one feels when walked in on while, say, masturbating. That, at least, takes effort and at least some imagination. This felt more like the sorry surprise a person might feel if they were jerking off an avatar, their computer mouse clicking and moving up and down, up and down. “Oh, that feels good,” one might hear, and from the same voice who speaks “You’ve got mail.”

It wasn’t until a few months in that I began to see things for what they really were. The game mirrored reality close enough that it began immediately losing appeal. The virtual world, too, had its fair share of careers, and I realized that there had been times (more so than I wanted to admit) when I had walked a tight line between being late for my real job just so that I could earn a few more credits to buy that neater, more powerful ship.

Because of its advanced learning curve, tutorials would pop up every time I tried to do something new, and in reading their little cards, squinting at the screen, my back curling up more and more towards permanent scoliosis, the parallels between this and high school did not escape me; it felt wrong that while I had not had the tenacity to finish college I was more than willing to shell out my credit card to learn how to mine an asteroid or research refining minerals. The stuff of life lessons, I somehow reasoned.

But perhaps the worst part was the killing. Not my killing other people, but rather their insistence on killing me. Every couple weeks, it seemed, I was dead and starting almost over again, with little to my virtual name, like a vagrant wandering the stars. I’d never imagined being able to say that I had been murdered. Much less six times, or by someone calling themselves Lord Zed. Looking back, it’s comical. But a few weeks ago, it was still just sad. Sad because of the fact that the second life I was living, the one I had chosen to be a part of, I was really no good at. In the grand scheme of things, my character would have been on the bottom, a building block on which people like Lord Zed would build their cosmic empires.

That, I realized, wasn’t for me. So, I pulled myself out, back to the world from which I’d come. The relief was immediate and cleansing. No more mission deadlines; no more research. Just my job. Just my life. Just my writing, welcoming me back. And though I’ve since canceled my subscription, the icon still sits on my desktop, with its quiet insistence of fun and adventure. I look over at it sometimes, considering its possibility like a key to a musty attic door. But then I stop to remind myself of the duality, and how if I choose to live a second life, what good is the first?