So, I play-test mobile games, one of which is a garden design game, and it’s a great little game. It’s fun, very zen, and very low stress. It uses real life locations which can be fascinating and the way they have it set up, you wind up learning a lot more than you think. As someone who cannot enjoy gardens in real life because of allergies, it’s that much more delightful for me personally.
So yesterday, I logged in and was going through the daily designs and watering my plants and voting for the designs I liked the best out of the ones up for voting. One of the daily challenges caught my eye because it was set somewhere I was familiar with (not unusual for me with how I’ve ping ponged around the Americas) and just the sense-memory of having been there and then the upswell of grief hit me out of nowhere.
The place was where my former? ex? braintwin/soulmate/QPP lived. I’d gone out to visit them and gotten to see around. It had been a marvellous trip. There are question marks above because I’ve never gotten closure on what happened there. They were there one day and then gone the next. Internet presence scrubbed – no forwarding address. We were exceptionally close for all that we rarely got to be in the same state. Talk every day except for meals and sleep sort of close. We never bothered labeling our relationship. When I am feeling particularly maudlin, the closest description I get is Blue and Red from This Is How You Lose The Time War.
It was such a small thing. Just a city name and state in tiny font in a mobile game. The rush of grief and anger and loss swept over me and left me a little unstable on the couch for a moment. For a moment, everything felt so fresh again and then it receded like the water before a tsunami waiting for that next whatever to come flooding in again.
It’s been 9 years and I still miss them.