D-E-L-E-T-E
a short story.
Time passes by as if regret didn’t exist and mistakes couldn’t be made.
As if once it’s over one would wake-up and start anew.
For a while now “life” has eluded me. It escapes my grip through the gaps between my fingers. The void of this invisible net we call “everyday life” has managed to bring me to a sort of living-death concealed in synthetic happiness. The kind of happiness that bridges the wires of consciousness from one reality to another, from one dream to another, from one death to another, and that inevitably numbs the soul away.
The deeper you go and the longer you stay, you begin to forget yourself. The “real” you becomes faint, like a childhood memory and you lose sense of what is.
… or rather…
You don’t care.
And “what is” does not matter.
At least it doesn’t matter here, where the flowers never wither, the sand is always gray, and the carpet of grass covering the landforms is always green.
Always.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
I mean, would you say “no” to the opportunity of being whoever you always wanted to be? surrender the life you know in order to seize control of everything?
Would you pass on the opportunity to live a familiar life among strangers? discovering unknown times and places? All of it built by the person who you always wanted to be and never could. A resident of a place that transcends the cruel reality of life: “you are who you think you are as much as you are who your neighbors believe you to be”. How enticing it is to know this rule does not apply here, where we thrive by wearing masks and building lives that feel so full… but are barely real.
Barely.
I made my choice. I plunged into the unknown with high hopes of finding my place because this world, your world, rejected me. It became a place I no longer wanted to partake on: a realm of confusing woven realities and moral values favoring only a few.
A world that in its attempt to fulfill one type of righteousness, it springs into many, many evils and it pushes others like me into the abyss of self-destruction, because there is no place for us among you.
The world has made this quite clear.
However… today… today I curse the moment I turned my back to the world and became, by my own doing (no one else to blame here), a creature who could never resemble the person that looks back at me every time I glance into a mirror.
Her long, flawless hair, her absolutely perfect translucent green eyes, a body and face no plastic surgery could ever afford me. All the things I always wanted and that both nature and genetics had refused me.
Now that I think of it, it is quite surreal that by just typing on a keyboard I had become someone different, someone who lived in another world and lived another life. My life, the one I always wanted but could never have.
She went from being nothing; a made-up creature living in a virtual world, to becoming the only reason I’d wake up everyday. Through her I discovered a world that filled me with satisfaction, a world that rewarded me for learning from my mistakes, rather than punishing me for now knowing. This world, where my efforts counted for something and everything I did bore fruit almost immediately, became… home.
Suddenly, other broken souls began to reach out to know the secret behind my skill. Where I had found my weapons, what type of abilities I was using. How much time I had invested in building this life.
And just like that, for the first time in a long time I felt useful, wanted, appreciated and admired. Everything “real life” had denied me because I am… me.
But they like me because of me…
Don’t they?
If I was to put it in numbers how long I’ve been sitting here the last 5 years of my life it would sum up to more or less 2.15 years.
That is 25.76 months of nonexistence.
112 weeks of nothing
784 days that I will never get back.
18,816 hours of building nobody.
1128960 minutes that, at the end of the day, could have been put to a better use.
Looking back now, I can only laugh at how much time I’ve thrown away in this place, this addiction that led me to live a life that is not mine.
It literally does not belong to me.
Today is my 30th birthday, and I woke up to find that all my achievements are summed up in bits of information that are not tangible. Information that does not even belong to me, because in the smallest print of the user’s terms and conditions, it says very clearly that nothing I’ve done here is mine.
It’s borrowed.
It belongs to them.
Two clouded eyes stare blankly at a sterile screen that reads:
“Are you sure you want to delete your character? If so, please enter the word DELETE”
The faint outline of a person can be discerned on the screen, but the word “Soliris” glows so brightly on the monitor it makes it difficult to see. Meanwhile, on the foreground, the figure of an animated woman stands there gracefully. Her face is perfect, not a single sign that time has passed. Her long white hair gives her a mystical aura along with the pointed ears that peek off both sides of her head. Her emerald green eyes and white skin glisten with a heavenly radiance.
Trembling fingers lay on a keyboard missing some keys.
The letters Q, W, E, A and D are almost completely worn-out.
A heavy sigh is released, as the fingers press one by one.
D
E
L
E
T
E
Time must have stopped, tears began to fall, eyes were closed and the “enter” button was pressed.
A few seconds passed before eyes opened slowly, only to find an empty screen.
“Soliris” had disappeared, leaving in her place the reflection of a person whose life had just begun.
I wrote this for a creative writing class back in 2012.
It’s meant to explore the psyche of a person who was shunned as a teenager / young adult by their peers because they didn’t “fit in” and found solace in online communities buy building “something” just to realize that “something” is actually a whole lot of nothing.
With all the buzz about about the Metaverse I’ve seen lately, it seems appropriate for it to be published.
