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passionproject1 · 10 months ago

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We were 12. The coolest boy in my school just couldn’t stop talking about the newest coolest game he was playing online. He sat in the back of the lime coloured room, surrounded by the remaining class B boys, the beta boys, his gang, his little followers, who were carefully listening to his monologue. Every few minutes he would interrupt his speech to violently whip his head to the right in order to arrange his fringe into a perfect emo/justin bieber formation. “Minecraft,” was the name of the game, I wrote it in the back of my notebook and carried it home. That night I sat on my favorite deep emerald chair researching the game further, preparing to beg my dad to buy it. I had already downloaded the free version but I wanted to make an avatar and you could only access that feature if you paid. This purchase was essential to flex on my boy classmates. Finally dad said yes and let me use his card. I immediately canceled guitar hero night with the girls, ready to explore the pixelated expanse of Minecraft.

My new name was Yumomo, a random japanese sounding name I thought of. My outfit was green and pink with a frog hat, a skin I stole from some minecraft website because I thought it was cute. I jumped into my solo world but quickly found it too isolating, so I checked the list of best polish Minecraft servers. The one I chose was RPG themed and as I later found out was made up entirely of male players. In 2011, Minecraft hadn’t broken into the gamer girl realm yet, hardly into the youtube gamer realm either. Back then it was only played by indie game nerds and basement dwellers, not 12 year old polish girls. So for the moment I was the queen of my server and officially (PAUSE) “not like other girls.” I remember that first day when they all saw my skin, girly and pink, and wrote “are you actually a girl” into the chat. To prove it I had to join a group call on team speak 3, some proto discord gamer tool. Before I logged on, I practiced what I would say using a voice recorder on my dads phone. I tested different variations of the name introduction, different “Hello’s,” “i am’s”, and “my name is,” to come up with the cute maxxed ideal version of the internet girl they were about to meet. I nervously turned on the app, shouted at my younger sister to shut up and just as I was about to say the magic girl code into the hormonal ears of boy teens I heard one of boys say “hey, maybe next time mute your speaker before you shout at your sister.” My heart dropped, I shut the laptop and sat in silence. (pause for impact) My eyes started to water. I wasn't a cool girl in real life and now I couldn't even be a cool girl online. It was doomed from the start, over before it even started. The brutal reality of the boy world came crashing down on me all because I didn't know how to use speak3. Little did I know this lack of speak3 proficiency made me meet my first boyfriend.

His real name was Antoni, I don’t remember his minecraft name. After my pulse had cooled down and I turned my laptop back on, a private chat request from him appeared on the side of the teamspeak3 app. He typed “siemasz” which is a word for hi in polish that literally no one uses in Poland. He also wrote something along the lines of “Don’t worry, sorry for them laughing, I was stressed before I talked online for the first time too” and that comforted me. He wasn’t like one of the bad, annoying smelly boys, the “girls are too dumb to understand the computer” and “girls are too emotional we shouldn’t play with them” preacher preteens, he wasn’t the intimidatingly-different-than-the -girls type of boy that I was in contact with at school. He acted like you want them (boys) to act, he had the qualities of an anime protagonist, he saved me from further teamspeak ridicule and he spared me from feeling like an idiot on my own. He invited me to play on his and his brothers private server first just to ease me gently into the whole situation. I accepted and spent the entire night playing just with him. And when he called, on Skype instead of teamspeak3, I answered with my camera turned off but my mic on, and we chatted. We ended up chatting like that, with both of our cameras off, playing on minecraft servers with countless other people - and sometimes just on our own - for almost a year. He slipped into my routine and broke my boy interaction shyness. Every day I was looking forward to our evenings of playing minecraft, and every time I was too busy to talk to him i would feel sad.

The Day before Christmas I was at the airport about to fly to England when my Yellow samsung corby received a message from him. It was a confession of his love to me, long and sincere, “I don’t care that I have never seen your face, I like speaking to you, I like spending my time with you and I would like to meet you.” He also mentioned that we should exchange pictures. I had butterflies in my stomach reading the sentences. For hours on the plane I kept rereading the text and trying to imagine what he looks like. I tried to vibe-match looks in my mind to his smooth, low but still youthful and boyish voice. I pictured him towering over me, with a swooping side fringe and a cool Cropp hoodie. I thought about us kissing for the first time, my girlfriends being jealous, my dog excited at the sight of him during one of his monthly visits. As soon as I got to my mums house I went on to try to vibe-match my looks to my sweet voice I was using to seduce him for the past year. Did I really suit my own vibe? There was a lot to perfect in my looks and I didn’t feel confident that I could fully embody the girl he must have been imagining. I pulled up the video of my idol venus angelic and with the limited makeup my mum owned I tried to recreate her vibe. Big anime eyes, intense blush, gradient lips. I put on my blue denim hair bow and took a selfie on photo booth. I covered one side of my face with my hand. I felt myself. The following evening whilst we were chatting with our cameras off and our mics on we sent each other the pictures. Surprisingly he looked similar to what i had imagined for him: golden retriver as a boy, slightly wavy gold hair with a little side fringe, awkward cute smile,acne, skinny and tall-presenting. According to him I looked how he imagined too, cute and girly. The next stop of video talking hadn’t been suggested by either of us. We were just happy to continue chatting with a vague image of ourselves in our heads, because it didn’t really matter what we looked like. Our relationship was online so it was functioning according to online gaming friends rules. As long as the arrangement remained online, we didn’t need anything more.

At least I didn’t for now.

One spring day Antoni asked me if I was planning to go to Pyrcon, a massive anime convention that is organised in his city, only 2 hours away from where i lived. I said I would probably be there. The truth was I knew I would definitely be there, in fact me and my friend had been planning our outfits for months. For some reason giving a definite answer, knowing the question that would follow felt too overwhelming. He asked, all excited, if I wanted to meet up in real life and I said yes with equal excitement. In reality, something told me that I didn’t want to meet him. Not because I was worried that he wasn’t real, that he was a catfish, but because I was worried that I’d be too real for him, with my chubby face, little stumpy legs, feet dressed in two different shoes. I was scared of holding his real hand and kissing his mouth, the inevitable teenage intimacy that seems so sweet in theory but ends up awkward in practice. I was happy for us to continue our love in the virtual world we created.

I couldn’t sleep the night prior to the convention. This day was about to change the trajectory of my life and the future felt more dreadful than exciting, though my friends kept trying to ease my stresses. I didn’t want to ruin the excitement for him, so the whole journey to the con I played along, at times experiencing waves of real excitement, followed by the gut wrenching anticipation of failure and disappointment. I was dressed in my frog outfit and did my makeup as well as i could. My emergency nicholas cage mas, a sign that I was a fan of the webcomic Homestuck, was poking out of my NANA tote bag. For some reason, just having the mask in my bag was an anti-anxiety shield. At previous conventions, I would wear it when the pressure of being surrounded by so many people felt like too much and I was too young to numb the angst with drugs and alcohol.

We arrived at the convention. The nasty stress feeling had been growing increasingly throughout the day, from the moment I got out of bed to the second I set foot in the con. It was by my side wherever I went, causing my eyes to scan every corner in the search for him and his brother. I had to be prepared at all times to pull out the mask, in case he came too close and recognised me. I was undercover in his kingdom. A surprise meeting was not likely, considering the 5000 people in attendance, but regardless I couldn’t allow it to be an option. Our real meeting was meant to take place at some anime panel, later in the day. Minutes before the meeting, I left my friends, who were convinced that the guy was really some old pedophile, but I let them follow me from afar just in case for their piece of mind. I put on my protective mask, and headed to the room. Inside I looked around. He wasn’t there. I double checked the location, the time, different corners of the room, but the corner where he was supposed to stand was occupied only by gross nerd guys. The smelly long hair ones. My panic was mixed with some sense of relief. This is it, he’s one of them, and if he is one of them I can just pretend that I left because I wasn’t feeling well and just go back to us, playing online. Maybe at some point I’d be mature enough to accept his physical self, and take the next step, come to terms with his ugly materiality, maybe by the time we met, by the time I was ready to squash my anxiety he would have had a glow up. Maybe not crossing that boundary now was a win-win.

Just before the start, in the colorful crowd of cosplayers, e-girls, cat ears, katanas, big titty anime girl pillows stuffing itself into the room, I saw him. His fleshy youthful face was looking better than the picture, put together into a concerned focused look aimed to find me. I watched him from a distance, looking for me, dialing my number and impatiently waiting to hear back, as I was holding onto my vibrating phone inside my pocket. I saw him sitting down, disappointed and confused, saw him checking his phone every few minutes, then his older brother coming in, comforting him, possibly telling him either that girls suck or that maybe something happened to me, depending on his prior experience with women. All that time I stood in the back, wanting to text him “don’t worry *hugs*” and “i love you *kisses*” but my body wouldn’t move, I was paralysed. My mind kept telling me “what’s the worst that could happen” before filling my head with all of the worst scenarios. I imagined:

-The smell of awkwardness in the air

-inability to make a conversation

-him not finding me attractive in real life and abandoning me, the virtual me, the me he loved or

-him liking me, wanting to make real moves, have real meetings instead of the safe, controlled, virtual, the ones i was comfortable with

It all felt like too much. And despite being a few meters away, and seeing his despair, I looked at him one last time and went back to my friends. It took me a while to come up with an excuse and text him back, but there was no excuse for what I did. The truth was sad and hard to understand. If none of my friends understood why I did this then why would he? So I lied, said that I wasn’t feeling well and that I had to leave, which felt like the most believable excuse but perhaps not believable enough for him not to question it himself. Our relationship was broken, and we stopped calling, then we stopped texting. Minecraft got boring. When I first installed Skype, I accidentally allowed it to automatically open every time I turned on my computer. When me and antoni were in love, I never had a reason to change the setting, but now I would force quit it every time I turned my old macbook on. I abandoned the block lands and moved my virtual self onto the more entertaining World of Warcraft.

Sometimes I wish I was able to say sorry.

#Spotify

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