It's pretty accurate to say that I felt like a complete ass upon the release of the May issue. My sappy article about teaching the new boyfriend the beauty that is an Aard addiction was already pretty much trash. Shortly after I composed it, he did create a character, and I promptly mstatused him with great joy. Within a week and a half, he excused himself from my life in a fantastically passive aggressive manner, and promptly disappeared. With the help of a friendly imm (I won't name them, but let's just say I spent some time picking back hair off of my clothes), I paid the 2 TP price to repossess the Aard equipment my now MIA spouse held, declining the option of divorce, which is free, and would have accomplished the same thing. Finally, he re-emerged in the virtual world, via a Myspace bulletin announcing a great tragedy in his life. My head spun and I flapped my arms a bit, but eventually, I calmed down enough to send my sympathies in a polite and generic text message, which he politely, and generically acknowledged.

  I usually believe that closure is a myth, having had so many strange experiences where people enter and exit my life at random intervals. Even this person has done such; as a fourteen year old girl, I first developed my crush on him in our mutual home town, and for ten years, I held a great deal of hero worship for him, though I was never his friend. I admired him at what I felt was a safe distance, until we reconnected here, hundreds of miles of way from our shared place of birth, and I was utterly convinced it was the work of the cosmic forces. For our intense romance to be short lived, and so abruptly ended, was quite devastating and earth shattering for me. To have him reappear was much the same, but when I finally send that message, and received his response, I finally felt free of the looming cloud of 'wtf?!?' that had been hanging over my thoughts of him, and of the situation.

   It's been an emotional day all around. I have spent several weeks contemplating the composition of this follow up article, since it's not entirely relevant for all of the mud public, but I think that the players who have found and lost love on Aard, and gotten love mixed up with it, will be able to relate in some fashion. The deciding factor for me to finally break down and write it was not this experience alone. Within 24 hours of the initial shock of this circumstance, I received a second message from beyond the emotional grave. This one is from the person who first taught me to keep romance and Aard separate - my ex-husband. Though already we have been divorced longer than we were married, he occasionally tries to make some sort of random, obscure contact. The last time was in January, so I spent a bit of time cursing a storm as to why today, of all days, I was getting this double dose of heart wrenching reminders.

   Since the re-learning of this lesson, I've remained firm in my resolution to temporarily forbid myself from dating. Obviously, I have a bit left to learn about when and where to let certain people be prominently involved in my life, and how to handle it when they cease being there. I may keep the inactive mudspouse a while longer, since I don't really expect he will be re-logging onto Aard, and it's a nice way to deter other proposals of mstatusry. Once I am ready to go down the romance road again, I'll probably enthusiastically support their restraint in not exploring my happy little text world too deeply. Before this most recent involvement, I maintained a fairly significant relationship for nearly a year with a partner who knew of the game, and would occasionally try to watch the screen or ask questions, but never created a character. Being a graphics whore, he saw no use for a text only environment.

   While I can't change the fact that my heart turns into an AcroContortionist when these blips blip my radar, I'm ultimately quite grateful that they abandoned the old 127.0.0.1 hunting grounds. I'm glad to have my sanctuary when days like this occur, and it would be awful to feel genuine worry that the MUD might not be the safest escape. I'm not about to try my luck or play the numbers, though. Perhaps the third time is a charm, but I'm not going to try to prove it.