A Common Theme

In the morning, I had set my alarm so we could get there early.  It went off, and I lay there for a moment, thinking about what needed to be done for the day.  Ben climbed on top of me and began to make love to me.  It was only a moment before he climaxed.  He collapsed on me and buried his face, embarrassed.  I giggled and shoved him off.  We showered again and got ready for faire.

That night, I showered and put on a nice nightgown, lit a couple of candles, and got into bed waiting for him.  I thought that now we could do it properly.  He stood in my bedroom door like a deer in the headlights.  “Oh,” he said, “I’m tired.”

I was embarrassed, but blew out the candles and went to sleep.

That pretty much set the tone of our relationship.  Things were great when he was in the mood.  But otherwise, he put no effort into the relationship.  He worked sporadically.  He was an artist and felt that working a regular job was crushing his soul.  It was amazing how when we wanted to go to on a particular trip, he’d manage to make a lot of money in a short period of time, but when it came to monthly bills, he couldn’t find the motivation.

He was a talented mural painter and he did faux finishes.  He also made beautiful leather crafts, mostly masks, which he could sell at Ren Faire.   For his birthday, I had an oak cart made with drawers and cabinets in it so that he could display masks on one side while working on them on the other side.  I honestly can’t think of a single gift he bought me in our entire relationship.  We did travel, and it was wonderful.  We traveled well together.  But Ben lived for vacations, and the rest of the time, he hated having to be a grown-up.

We fought often about his drinking.  There was one particular woman from Faire who was living with another of Ben’s friends.  She didn’t do a very convincing job of pretending that she liked me.  She encouraged Ben to drink and would tell him that he wasn’t any fun anymore because I didn’t drink and sometimes (rarely) he’d forgo the alcohol for me.

We had been together for about three years.  I’d begun to resent him because I worked every day to pay the household bills, as well as his car payment and insurance and the fine he had incurred in a DUI that occurred before we started seeing each other.

I’d begun to struggle at work, too.  A high school in Sacramento was much different than a high school in a rural area 35 miles away.  The kids were rough.  There was very little support from the administration.  I was burning out, which is another story I hope to tell someday.

In the midst of all of this, I returned to the habit of burying myself in my computer.  I wrote a lot and I played a recently-revived version of a very old Online RPG called Meridian 59.  I think there were only two servers at that time, and max server population was less than 200.  Dying in-game was broadcast to the entire server.  And when you died, you lost every item you were carrying.  It was a  player vs player game, and there were those whose only purpose was to go out and randomly kill people who were just trying to level up and steal everything they were carrying.

I was the leader of a guild called Mission of Mercy, MOM for short, whose goals were to help newbies, assist those who had recently been killed in-game, organize server-wide events, and negotiate peace treaties for those events.

There was another guild in the game who considered themselves the peacekeepers of the server.  They hunted down those who had been marked as murderers in the game.  The leader of that guild was named Connor.  He suggested that our characters get married because our guilds were so popular and were considered the good guys of the server.  I thought that would be fun, so we organized a wedding in game, and game admins threw us a shindig.

Over the next few weeks, Connor did all those things that one would think a husband would do.  He’d check in with me every day to make sure I had everything I needed.  He’d give me gold and reagents.  Roses were semi-rare items in the game and he gave me one.

There were, of course, enemies in the game – people who wanted to wreak havoc targeted me to get to Connor.  He was very protective, as was his guild.

I started thinking about how pathetic it was that the first man who’d ever considered it his mission to protect and provide for me was a character in a game.  It burrowed into my brain and spread out.  It wasn’t just men.  Connor was the first anything in my life who wanted to protect and provide for me.    I began to unravel.