The power of stories
A friend of mine died suddenly over the weekend.
We only knew each other over the internet but we were good friends. She was even coming out in May - around the 21st- to visit me on her way to New York and grad school. She was going to be getting a Masters and then a PhD in History specializing in like the Prohibition era. I was going to take her to the restaurant where they filmed the Schwarma scene in the Avengers.
We met over Journal/DW rping at a game called the Library and eventually we hit it off smashingly. We clicked over banana slugs of all things.
I was talking to another friend, one that I met through her, about how strange it seemed that we both missed her so much. After all we never saw her in person, just through photographs she posted. We never heard her speak, except through voice recording memes. Our entire contact was through words and screens. Why should someone like that, someone we’ve never had a physical contact with hurt so much when they go?
After some thought, I realized what it was: we told stories together. In our Role playing, during games or private story lines, we were telling stories together and that’s a very intimate thing to do. We were creating lives together. We were creating worlds together. Opening ourselves up to the other person and saying this is something I think is interesting that I created and I want to share it with you. I want you to be apart of it.
We told stories with characters and lived their lives, their private moments, their hours, days and years. Births and deaths, finding love and losing it. Anxiety over things, over family and friends and the world around them. Laughing at the good things, enjoying the strange moments that happen between lovers and friends. Every piece of a person’s life that they could go through with another person, we did together. Several times over.
And now these stories, all of them incomplete, all of these lives incomplete are gone forever. They will never be finished. They are lives cut short, just like hers. We’ve lost a part of ourselves, a creative and intimate part of our self that we shared with another person. We lost a bit of our self that said to someone let’s make something bigger and better than just the one of us.
Even if we were to find another person who plays the same characters she did, it wouldn’t be the same. The new person would play them differently. They wouldn’t have the same history or knowledge of the ideas we came up with. They wouldn’t have the same experiences that the two of us shared to get to these stories. After all, everyone has their own spin on what makes a character tick or work.
I think this is why role playing, is so involving. We’re not just playing make believe. We’re creating something more than ourselves and we’re sharing it with other people. Saying, I want you to help me make this thing. I need your help to make this thing, to put this idea into the world and to make it grand and wondrous and glorious. It may only be the two of us who ever see this, but it will be an awesome and amazing and fantastic and beautiful and I want to do it with you.
I am choosing you, I think you would be good, perfect, to share this experience, to help create this experience.
And now, it’s gone.
Gone forever, a broken book with the ending pages torn out. A doll left by the wayside on the road caught in the rain. The sad house, falling apart in the field. You can see the glory of what it used to be, but all you have is memories.
At least the memories are good ones.
And at least I can go back and read the stories we created.
We only knew each other over the internet but we were good friends. She was even coming out in May - around the 21st- to visit me on her way to New York and grad school. She was going to be getting a Masters and then a PhD in History specializing in like the Prohibition era. I was going to take her to the restaurant where they filmed the Schwarma scene in the Avengers.
We met over Journal/DW rping at a game called the Library and eventually we hit it off smashingly. We clicked over banana slugs of all things.
I was talking to another friend, one that I met through her, about how strange it seemed that we both missed her so much. After all we never saw her in person, just through photographs she posted. We never heard her speak, except through voice recording memes. Our entire contact was through words and screens. Why should someone like that, someone we’ve never had a physical contact with hurt so much when they go?
After some thought, I realized what it was: we told stories together. In our Role playing, during games or private story lines, we were telling stories together and that’s a very intimate thing to do. We were creating lives together. We were creating worlds together. Opening ourselves up to the other person and saying this is something I think is interesting that I created and I want to share it with you. I want you to be apart of it.
We told stories with characters and lived their lives, their private moments, their hours, days and years. Births and deaths, finding love and losing it. Anxiety over things, over family and friends and the world around them. Laughing at the good things, enjoying the strange moments that happen between lovers and friends. Every piece of a person’s life that they could go through with another person, we did together. Several times over.
And now these stories, all of them incomplete, all of these lives incomplete are gone forever. They will never be finished. They are lives cut short, just like hers. We’ve lost a part of ourselves, a creative and intimate part of our self that we shared with another person. We lost a bit of our self that said to someone let’s make something bigger and better than just the one of us.
Even if we were to find another person who plays the same characters she did, it wouldn’t be the same. The new person would play them differently. They wouldn’t have the same history or knowledge of the ideas we came up with. They wouldn’t have the same experiences that the two of us shared to get to these stories. After all, everyone has their own spin on what makes a character tick or work.
I think this is why role playing, is so involving. We’re not just playing make believe. We’re creating something more than ourselves and we’re sharing it with other people. Saying, I want you to help me make this thing. I need your help to make this thing, to put this idea into the world and to make it grand and wondrous and glorious. It may only be the two of us who ever see this, but it will be an awesome and amazing and fantastic and beautiful and I want to do it with you.
I am choosing you, I think you would be good, perfect, to share this experience, to help create this experience.
And now, it’s gone.
Gone forever, a broken book with the ending pages torn out. A doll left by the wayside on the road caught in the rain. The sad house, falling apart in the field. You can see the glory of what it used to be, but all you have is memories.
At least the memories are good ones.
And at least I can go back and read the stories we created.