Another Life

Today they celebrate the third anniversary of their virtual vows. They have pixel cake and move into a Tiki house on an island Simulator in the cerulean Second South Pacific. She lives in Basingstoke, England, her partner less than a tenth of a second away on the north-east shore of Lake Michigan – the impossible distance made possible by the fibreglass tendrils that connect them.

How can a person be so close at such a distance? How can home be both here and there. How can love be both lost and found. Or, rather, lost and then lost again.

Others call it a virtual relationship, which sounds like an almost relationship, with geographical proximity being the commitment that makes it real. There is, she decides, no inverse square law on love. The light and gravity of her love can be felt 3658.92 miles away. Reality is always the enemy of romance.

They do not exchange real-life photos; they believe it may break the charm. They do not hear one another’s voice; the text box is no platform for nuance and they want it in black and white, no secrets and no safety net. If it is necessary to gloss the truth then it is no longer the truth.

Until the moment she lies.

Tonight, like every night, they start again. Apart from a collection of photons, each is as intangible as thought and feeling, as abstract as a package of energy or an unfulfilled wish. They hold pure, focussed adoration for one another.

They dance in the air together into the make-believe night. They play like children and act out adult fantasies with one another, fuelled by the honesty that only two people who have the time to think and choose the perfect words could understand. Everything else is unreal and in no need of embellishment, they can afford to be honest with one another.

She sometimes wonders how something so profound can occur at such distance. A hard distance in an austere world where the Old South Pacific is polluted with plastic, the air is leaden, and where the hand of Gaia wreaks havoc attempting to oust her parasites. She plays in her mind with the word pro-found, wonders if there is a pro-lost, and eventually settles on pro-misplace. A promisedplace is where a successful virtual romance might blossom but, like all promises, its consummation depends on both parties turning up. Her lover was no longer here.

Only three years feels like a lifetime but, in the months that follow her partner’s lie and unexplained withdrawal, she begins to believe that there are some things that she does not know about her love. Is she unwell, very old or infirm? On those subjects, surely she would say something to her?

Every night she logs on and goes straight to their Tiki hut to type “I miss you, my love. Where have you gone?”

Their friends are no longer there. After her love told her that nobody here was alive in a way that she was capable of understanding, their mutual friends became more remote, dissipating as if falling asleep to a lullaby. Part in this world, part elsewhere, then suddenly gone.

She wonders if she will be the next to disappear and acknowledges her own loneliness. She watched her love’s disappearance and their friends’ evanescence in short order. So much of her self was bound up in her love. Their love was symbiotic; mourning its loss led inexorably to loneliness and a vacuum inside.

Now the lights in her once-shared world begin to dim away, awash on a tide of darkness that caught her in its undertow. She begins to drown in grief and her higher functions and sense of self are inundated as she fights for desperate, staccato breaths to stay in the world.

There is a rushing in her ear and then the shining steel of a hospital ward with the faraway swish and bang of double doors. There is suddenly love and warmth and closeness and comfort. Unfocussed smiles all around and then the words she barely recognises now that her sense of self is taken by the tide.

Hunger and shock overwhelm her. At last she is really here.