I didn’t graduate from homeschooling, but eventually it trailed off—a never-finished thesis paper on climate change, a B in calculus at a community college. Then, instead of enrolling in a university, I spent two years playing World of Warcraft. Women do this too.
My mom didn’t want me to go to college. She wanted me to stay home because I was “still basically a kid” and wasn’t “emotionally or logistically ready to live independently.” I think she was lonely. So I stayed home. I loved my mom, and I didn’t want to hurt her. I was also really into World of Warcraft.
I played a male Night Elf druid named Siladan Wintersinger. Siladan’s face was made of limited planes, a sharp hawk nose in two polygons, eyes that were—unpoetically—two sunken white orbs. His cheekbones were so parallel, so clearly delineated, that in a heavy shadow they bisected his face like he was wearing a mask. His eyebrows could furrow in anger or shoot up in surprise. His mouth opened long into an O, or wide into a grim, froglike smile. I never saw his bottom teeth.
I didn’t play a male character out of some latent desire; I didn’t want to become or fuck him. Instead I thought of Siladan as a separate person. He had nothing to do with me, except that I watched him for eleven hours every day. I lived a third-person kind of life. I thought Now Siladan searches the Blasted Lands for rare herbs, not Now I’m searching the Blasted Lands for rare herbs. I definitely didn’t think I am sitting in a dark cold room, my legs hurt, and on a screen a small poorly rendered figure follows the cursor as I click on poorly rendered bushes and flowers. Honestly, I didn’t even look at the herbs—spray of pixels, disconnected lines and spheres—but looked for the yellow number which indicated the herb was rare.
I wondered what Siladan thought while he gathered the herbs. I wondered if he liked it. I imagined he found that hard, honest labor relaxing. I imagined that when I wasn’t looking, he would bend to the earth, wipe his sweat, shade his eyes from the sun, and pause to drink cool water from his canteen. Better than his usual work: killing things.
Siladan excelled at killing things. Whole forests of beasts, whole citadels of men. Grinding their lives away. He wasn’t limited by killing skill but by computing power: more than six enemies in a battle and my laptop creaked and moaned like a sinking ship. But then I turned eighteen and came into my inheritance. I’d never possessed my own money before—never even owned a wallet. I didn’t like to think about the trust my dad left me, or about his will, or those trembly, wrenching letters I was supposed to open every birthday. When I finally talked to the attorney, the sum she named seemed arbitrarily large. Right away, I bought a $400 CPU, a $1,000 graphics card, and two monitors stacked on top of one another, one tilted at an angle, like the window of a spaceship. My mom told me I should stop and save, that I was draining the well dry.
I joined a guild, but I didn’t make friends with them. I had tried. I knew that’s why most lonely people played World of Warcraft. But it felt like sullying Siladan’s otherworldly independence to see my words appear in a speech bubble out of his mouth. Besides, I didn’t like my guild much: they talked about nothing, comic book movies, sex jokes. I didn’t know how Siladan thought, or what he liked. But I doubted he’d talk about anime. TV didn’t exist where he lived.
Two of my guildmates were married with children. They referred to each other exclusively as “Hubby” and “the Wife.” As in, the Wife has to sit up with our LO (little one? loved one?) so she cant heal tonight. Or Hubby is leveling an alt come help! I wavered between finding them annoying or endearing. Mostly I felt bad for them; I assumed they must share some terrible secret, some immense wrong, so that instead of having sex or snuggling their kids they were here, at two a.m. on a Tuesday night, sitting at different computers in the same house, trying to pose their characters so it looked like they were holding hands.
I was ashamed of this part of my life even as it occurred. Eventually, that shame won over my love of late nights and my relationship with Siladan. After two years, I’d finished all the new content and maxed out my herbalism skill, and my mom had met Greg and wasn’t so lonely anymore. I traded my shambling gaming PC for a slim and mild MacBook. I finished the thesis paper. My mom bought me a cheap flight and cried when I told her she didn’t have to because I had my own money now.
I googled “how do college girls dress reddit” and then bought the appropriate clothes: leggings, boots, sweatshirt, windbreaker. I started brushing my hair again, which was some days ugly flat and other days unruly large. I thought about Siladan’s hair: a sheet of green glass, or two sheets hinged at the gorget of his armor. I thought about his few facial expressions: smile, anger, surprise.
I was glad for him. Now the visible part of his life was done. Maybe he’d feel relieved because he wouldn’t have to kill things anymore. Or maybe he’d feel relieved because he didn’t have to gather herbs, and he could get back to his only passion: killing. How would I know? He could disappear into whoever.
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