The summer between the two years of my graduate program I spent in the dorms at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, or UAA. I signed up for some online courses and applied early for housing and ended up with a pretty good situation. I was living independently, my workload was minimal and it was all covered under loans.
The semester prior, I had met a woman on an online dating site and we had been making plans to meet up when I got back to Anchorage. The dorms turned out to be our first meeting point and we wasted no time with formalities. But what does this have to do with gaming? Location, timing and an open mind connected a group of people in my dorm, which was more of an apartment, with each other under one unified pretense. That pretense was the controversial Dungeons and Dragons. I had seen them play from time to time, but the group of people was too terrifying for me to inquire about it. Finally, one night I came galloping down the stairs and made some flip comment like, “You guys are at it again, eh?” Well, the game master, my roommate and the resident advisor, replied, “Yup. Would you like to join us?” That stopped me in my tracks. Now I had an invitation into the group of people, but there was also that gleaming spotlight blaring down into my eyes. That night my response was a modest ‘no thanks’, but later, maybe a day or so after that game, I confronted my roommate and said that yes, in fact I was interested in joining them in their game. And that was that. He gave me a book and a character sheet and suggested that I read up on things. After I got started he would come back and help me fill out the rest of the sheet.
They were going to play that night, so I hurried to get my sheet squared away. There were way too many options to just read through and pick, so I convinced my roommate, John, to summarize things for me and help interpret what I wanted to do, what I wanted my role to be. Finally we were done and there was just waiting left to do.
We started kind of early, which was good as it turned out. I knew little of the game when we started, but by the end I was nearly fluent in making characters on my own. I went through five characters that night, a record within my gaming circle for a single session. Each had its own unique set of circumstances and each one was epic in its own way. We played for hours but still it was not enough. When the game was done and the supplies were gathered up to be put away I began to panic. I had no idea when they would join again to play this amazing game and I couldn’t get a straight answer out of any of them.
So I did what any manically obsessed person would do in this situation, I ran to my room and got on the internet to try to find this game online. I needed to have this thing in my life on a constant basis; I needed to have control of things. It was a quick search. I found what I was looking for at the website dndonlinegames.com. I created a profile and started looking for games that night. Unfortunately, you have to be accepted to a game in order to play. But I was in luck, there was this massive game starting right at the time that I joined and they were looking for as many players as they could find. I had an in and I took advantage of it.
So this is 2005, I am a second year grad student and I just started playing D&D online. This game that I had joined needed help so I was glad to offer my services. One of the dungeon masters suggested I get an instant messenger program so that we could talk about the game faster than just posting back and forth. I complied and was rewarded with a quick witted chick who typed lightning fast, knew how to flirt and somehow knew her impact on me from the very start.
Time moved on and I continued to play both online and in real life, or table top as it is referred to in the online world. My online DM, or dungeon master, and instant messaging friend was named alleycat and our flirtations became more prevalent throughout our gaming experience. When I felt confident with the material I tried DMing myself. I was quickly overwhelmed by opportunistic players who did acrobatics through the holes in my plots and my attempts to create a solid non-reality.
By the time I went back to school I had found out her real name. Ali had a boyfriend and lived in Canada, but was seemingly unhappy with her relationship. I was no stranger to long distance dating. Every year I went to school in Florida I either left someone in Alaska, or found someone in Florida and left them over the summer when I went home for the break. One time I thought I had figured it out. I had been dating a girl named Stacy for the whole school year, our junior year. I invited her up to Alaska for the a couple weeks over the summer and that seemed to tide us over until the next year. Senior year came and went and we were practically living together, taking turns at her house or my dorm. Graduation came and she broke up with me on the porch of the sculpture lab. I convinced her to give it a try, but we were going to different grad schools. I had helped her a lot with her application and was quite proud of her for getting in and going. She agreed to let it ride. A few months later, on the steps to the hotel I was staying at in New Jersey while I looked for housing I sat on the phone with Stacy. Her mind had changed and our relationship ended. Kind of.
Thanksgiving had come during my second year at grad school and Stacy had come back into my life. I had a bit of cash from getting a loan for school and then getting a graduate assistantship, which included a tuition waiver. I was offering to buy her a plane ticket to come to my school for thanksgiving. She had gotten very excited and said yes. That was a few weeks before thanksgiving. One week before, I got another call from Stacy. It was just not meant to be. All was not lost though, I still had the cash and the vacation time from school. And then I thought I would take a chance. I had been talking on the phone with Ali for a while now, burning up calling cards left and right. So I invited her to come and stay with me for a week or so. Her only reservation was that she would have to break up with her boyfriend, but that turned out to be only a minor obstacle.
Ali and I met for the very first time in the middle of a downpour halfway between a taxi and my studio on campus. Her wet hair was plastered to her head and face and eyeliner painted her cheeks black, but even though those cheeks were black they were taut with a beautiful smile. She hadn’t worn a raincoat, but I had, so when I pulled her to me in a hug, her face was buried in my rain-slicked jacket at about chest height. What an amazing visit that was. What an amazing girl.
Regardless of my new girlfriend, I had an obsession to live. I had given up living in my apartment after she left and spent all of my time in my studio. By this point I was somehow involved in at least twenty five games. The staff of dndonlinegames.com had gotten into a fight and some of them split and made their own site. I was a part of both. I ran games, I played in them, I talked to people about both running and playing. I had expanded my contact list for instant messaging from just Ali to over 300 contacts, all of them D&D related. When I wasn’t writing text for a post in a game, I was either building a character or talking to someone about optimizing character builds. On the two sites combined, I probably had 300 or more characters stored.
The problem with all of this at this particular time was that I left myself no time to paint. I was desperate to find inspiration to paint, but I was also desperate to continue in my world of fantasy online. In an effort to bridge the two worlds, I printed out one chapter of one of the games I was running. It took an entire ream of paper to print it. I would get studio visits from the professors pretty often, so I must have done something to hide what I was doing… On one of these visits I presented Dominique Nahas, famous art critic from New York, with my stack of paper and asked him how to make it art. We had a strange tangential conversation and finally he put his hand on the stack of paper and looked me straight in the face and said, “Josh, you need to paint.” And that was it. But I couldn’t.
During the day, or rather, during my waking hours, I would post and talk with others about the game. When I would try to sleep, I would stare up at the ceiling, but it was obscured by a mass of plumbing pipes. Night after night I would see myself hanging from the pipes. One night I called my mother about it and we had a long tearful conversation about me and my circumstance. That night I went back to my studio and found a length of rope. I also gathered up all of my knives and spent the next hour cutting the rope into one inch pieces. Then I wrapped each knife in paper towel and slid them under one of my colleague’s door. But that didn’t stop it. There were many pieces of equipment with which to end one’s life in this place and I had visions and hallucinations about each one.
Finally, after a lengthy period of time in my studio, people had become concerned. One morning I awoke with a start as I heard the key slide into my door and heard the handle turn. The door opened and I sat up. It was one of the professors and the secretary. They were there to make sure I was alive, or something like that. I know that feeling now, that feeling of walking into a room without being sure if the person in it is alive or dead. I explained to them that I was alright and that I needed a moment to get dressed, that I would be right out.
As promised, I appeared outside the room to a waiting audience. After a brief discussion, which I do not recall, the campus psychologist was alerted to my situation and I was escorted to see her. I had trouble filling out whatever paperwork they needed, but it was taken care of. While waiting, I decided that I was just going to be honest and upfront with her. There was nothing to be gained by hiding what was happening to me. After a while, I was shown into an office and seated across from a woman who began asking questions. I gave answers and then I began to talk. I talked about the ropes, the knives, the machines including the chop saw. I have trouble remembering the details of the visit, but that’s about all that was covered. I left and went back to my studio to work on my gaming. I was up early, so I had a decent start on the day.
Apparently the meeting scared the psychologist because she called my mother and threatened to have me admitted to a local hospital. Somehow my mother convinced her not to do that and with some calls to my psychiatrist in Alaska, perhaps an adjustment of meds and two very inspired large scale paintings for my thesis show I made it through my graduate program successfully.
That summer, Ali came up to Alaska for a month on airline miles courtesy of my parents. We had a great time. I had some money left over from the loan so we had some fun and then I got inspired to start up my life after grad school. I went to the hardware store and set up a business account and then purchased about $2,000 worth of tools and equipment. I earned a grant my second year at Montclair (grad school) to build a woodshop for the studio, so I already had a good idea of what to buy and how much it would cost. I also bought a snake.
Ali went back home and I stayed for the summer playing D&D and trying to work in the studio. I had the studio for a little longer than three months and in those three months I made three paintings. I left my truck parked down in New Jersey with the intention of flying back down and driving it up to Alaska. I had dumped thousands of dollars into fixing it up, but this was New Jersey, not Alaska. That’s not fair, I just chose poorly when I went looking for a mechanic shop. Anyway, I flew down to New Jersey, took care of a bunk ticket in New York and then drove up to Canada to visit Ali for a while. It was a great stay, but we both knew what was about to happen. My old roommate, John, flew down to meet us in the Toronto area and he was kind enough to run an impromptu game for me and Ali and most of Ali’s friends. By the end of the game, most of us had turned into mythical creatures. That was a sad night because we both knew that John and I were leaving in the morning. Fortunately, sadness does not inhibit passion.
So many stories related to gaming, but it seems to have been a very intense period of my life. The drive to Alaska took the better part of two weeks, probably the longest I had gone without gaming up to that point. I realized along the drive that I was going the wrong way, that I was driving away from my heart and that I desperately needed to turn around, but I couldn’t. I had a passenger and a goal and absolutely no logistical means to sustain myself in Canada, not to mention the lack of visa; but what about the saying, ‘love conquers all’? Well, I grew up hearing that saying and I was determined to see it work.
The drive cost me and my family a lot of money, thanks to the poor work of the mechanics that I chose in New Jersey. The transmission that they rebuilt blew up and needed to be rebuilt again, along with the transfer case this time. I called their shop but they informed me that I chose not to buy the $2,000 International Warranty Plan, so all repairs were out of pocket. The warranty was a scam, by the way. It cost about the same amount of money to get the first rebuild, so I would have been paying double for my transmission work. Whatever, I don’t need to write about that, I need to let it go.
Not long after we pulled into Alaska I loaded up my truck with the entirety of my two grand worth of equipment and drove it back to the hardware store. I asked someone to help me unload it all onto a cart and then waltzed inside to the returns desk. The manager on duty came over and gave me a funny look and said no way to the return. Reluctantly, I turned and walked outside to my truck. It was dark outside but I saw a group of employees leaving the store, one of which was the manager that just turned me away. It donned on me then that I was witnessing a shift change. I managed to calm myself down and catch my breath and I waited for about ten minutes or so before turning my cart around and pushing it back inside to the returns desk. There were new faces all around, a new manager, it was start of the day for all of them so smiles were a plenty. I explained my slightly twisted story once again but to a much more receptive crowd. The manager picked out a few tools, costing about thirty dollars I believe, and said, “We can’t take these back, but the rest is good if you have a receipt.” I gave some warm smiles and thanked them frequently and said goodbye as the transaction was completed. I now had the means to go back to Canada to see my girl.
Mom agreed to buy me a ticket on air miles, so with the return money and what I had left in the bank I had enough to consider sharing an apartment with Ali. I put most of my stuff in storage and packed up my painting supplies to be mailed. At first, Ali had found me a room for rent that was to become my studio. It was in the party zone of Kingston, Ontario, but I rolled with it and set up my room. The door didn’t lock, so I put in a new doorknob and felt slightly safer about leaving my stuff there. Where I spent most of my time, though, was at Ali’s apartment. She already had a roommate, named Kirsten, so adding me into the mix made for tight quarters. I tried to be invisible though, as much as possible for a guy who is 6’3” and 240 pounds. All the while I was keeping up with my online gaming…
The next semester Kirsten made up her mind that she could not live with the two of us like this, so if we were planning to stay then she was going to go somewhere else. That suited me just fine and Ali seemed to be okay with it also. We split the apartment up so that we shared a bedroom and the other bedroom we split, half was a studio and office for me, the other half was an office for her. Sometimes I walked her to class, sometimes not. Most of the time I was on the computer gaming. I think that this is the point that I should mention the game shop two blocks down the street from our apartment. It was called Nexus, or more formally, Kingston Gaming Nexus. The owner was a strong fellow named Mike. Mike loved all things game related and if it wasn’t in his shop, he could and would get it for you. Unless you wanted a puzzle or standard board game, for that he would refer you to another store down the road. Well, Mike knew a lot of people and to this day I feel compelled to say that he was the most charismatic individual I have ever had the pleasure of gaming with.
In the back of the shop there was a large open area with makeshift tables for people to play Magic the Gathering on and then there was a ping pong table with a four foot by eight foot gaming mat, commonly referred to as a battle mat. Many chairs sat around this table for many people coveted the honor of playing in one of Mike’s games. It took me a while, but in the end, I was in every game at Mike’s table, the only one I was never invited to was the one at his house. Ali was right there alongside me at the gaming table. She even ran a game for a short time. All told, we probably made it to six or seven games a week. Now keep in mind that these are four hour sessions per game.
So just to recap, I was back in the swing of things with my online gaming, meaning most of my waking hours were spent working online. In addition, we were gaming for four hours essentially every night. During the days when she did not have class it was like we were both in our own worlds, she in her office, me in the living room chair on my laptop, playing D&D. We had a few sessions with just the two of us, Ali would run a module for me and I would manage four characters at a time. That’s how desperate I was. Otherwise though, I stayed up late and she got up early so we kept missing each other at critical times. I’ve always thought that couples who get jobs with opposing shifts do so intentionally; the point is that the relationship isn’t working, but sometimes it’s easier to never see each other than to break up. Well, I had a night life and it was even more painful for her because my activities took place right in the apartment. Her feelings of rejection were evident, but she still chose to voice them as often as she could stand to. I began lying to her, making false promises that I was going to stay up and paint for a while and then come to bed, when in reality I was staying up on the computer playing D&D and chewing tobacco while she waited for me in the other room.
I went back home for a little while, I can’t place the event, maybe it was to reset my time limit on my passport. It was winter and while I was there I made arrangements for a table top game with my buddy Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived in a split level house in Anchorage with his girlfriend and two other roommates at the time, Adam and Alison. But this was to be a large scale game that Jeremiah was going to run so many more people would be there that night. I was particularly excited because Jeremiah is fairly notorious for his epic games. He pulls no punches when it comes to battling his players and his creativeness often confounds even the most seasoned player.
I arrived at his place and there was music playing from downstairs somewhere. I had a good bit of the gaming goods so after I was greeted I was told to head downstairs where we would be playing and get myself set up. As I made it downstairs I discovered where the music was coming from. The door to the right at the bottom of the stairs was Alison’s room. There was no light from under the door and the volume was pretty high. It seemed uncharacteristic of the quiet and coy Alison to be playing her music so loudly. But it wasn’t my place to say anything so I went to the room at the end of the hall and set up my stuff. A while later there was a buzz about the music. Alison’s room was right under Jeremiah’s room, so I am sure it was getting tiresome for them. Apparently Jeremiah had knocked on the door several times since he had been home and there was no answer. I reasoned aloud that perhaps she simply left in a hurry to get to work and forgot to turn off her music. Jeremiah countered that the door was locked. I said nothing, but thought it was easy enough to turn a lock by accident on a door.
Later, when the others had arrived, we sat down to the game. Jeremiah was trying to set the stage, but he was simply too distracted by the music. He decided that enough was enough, that they had called and given fair opportunity. His plan was to take the doorknob off and get inside to turn off the music. Now normally, the screws of a doorknob are located on the side with the lock, but someone must have been in a hurry for this door because they were on the outside. People started lining up in the hallway as Jeremiah went to work. Finally he got the handle off and pushed, but was met with solid resistance. He was able to reach his arm in enough to hit the light switch and then he called out “Oh my God”, and there was a loud crack. His years of Kung Fu had afforded him the uncanny ability to split the door in half with one blow. The top half of the door swung from its hinge as he started tossing objects to the people behind him. I was instructed to move as someone rolling a small drawer set pushed past me and shoved the drawers into the laundry room.
As instructed, I slinked back into the other room while the others tore down the wall that had been built inside the room. Adam was very dear friends with Alison and had known her for many years. I heard Jeremiah say something about “She cut herself” and then I heard Adam on the phone to 911. One by one people went into or peaked into the room and walked away. Once the room was clear, I remembered that I had been trained in first aid and CPR for all four years of my undergraduate program, so I figured that I was likely the most qualified to be a first responder. Nobody else seemed to be taking the job anyways. I steeled myself and marched into the room where I saw Alison laying face down on the bed. I moved quickly over to the bed and saw her pale blue face. I reached two fingers to her neck to find a pulse and instead found cold flesh. I started calling her name and when I could discern no pulse, I began slapping her face lightly and calling out to her. I opened her eye because that’s what people do in the movies do in situations like this. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but what I found was a lifeless stare that will haunt me forever.
In art school there was a special class in which students would go to see cadavers and were given the opportunity to paint or draw from them. I now know why my mother refused to let me go to those classes. It was obvious that Alison was struggling with life, or rather her struggle with life had failed and I decided that it was time for me to remember the sequence for CPR. It was a strange thing that happened next. Adam was still on the phone with 911 and just as I rolled her over on her side I looked over to him as he cried out and removed the shotgun from between her legs. Realization hit me, but not as hard as the image that waited for me as I turned back to my work. I still thought I could save her and was preparing to meet my mouth with hers and begin pumping on her chest but there was something terribly wrong with my plan. Her face was contorted, frozen in that smushed up expression that you get when you lay your face down on a pillow. That was going to make mouth to mouth difficult. The other complication was that she had shot herself point blank in the sternum. How was I supposed to do CPR under these conditions? I opted out of trying and let go of her body. She was dead, is dead, will always be dead and there was nothing I could do to change that. The only thing left was to try and figure out how to move on.
The cops came and we were all interviewed. After my interview I went with someone to get some alcohol for those in the house who did drink. Two bottles of rum and a case of beer was what I bought, the other guy got some stuff also, but I don’t recall what he got. We were buying for the house because the situation was so hopeless and terrible and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
I had insisted on a chaplain coming to the house and he had arrived by the time we got back with the alcohol. The chaplain made some comment about how the alcohol was not the answer to this problem, but all that managed to do was set Jeremiah off into a ranting argument with the chaplain, which he did in between shots of Captain Morgan. I took that as my cue to go find Maggie (Jeremiah’s girlfriend) and see how she was doing. She was down in Alison’s room working on cleaning up the mess. The coroners had removed the body, but that was it. We were left to deal with the blood soaked linens and the rest of her stuff. I’m not sure what made me stay and help, but I did. The two of us rolled up and bagged the bloody linens and I took them to the garbage outside. Then we put all of her stuff into boxes to get them ready to mail to her mother in Texas. Funny thing about that night is that when I went into the room the music was still on. It was playing from her computer on some sort of shuffle mix or something. I didn’t really thing about it but I took the mouse and clicked stop. As I was leaving to go home Maggie chuckled and commented on the computer. I stopped and looked at the song; All Apologies, by Nirvana.
I went to my parent’s house and let myself in. It was dark and late and I went upstairs and sat on the couch that I was sleeping on. I pulled out my laptop and went online to check my forums and see who was online on instant messenger. I found a few regulars and made quick work of sharing my story. Then I broke down. The world had shown me too much all at once and my adrenaline was long gone. My defenses crumbled and I leaned back into the couch and cried. Fortunately for me, my mother is early to rise. I was only home for an hour or two when their bedroom door opened and I was met by two boxers and a curious mother. She came and sat down and I told her my story. Her embrace at the end of my story meant more to me than I can explain. She made me breakfast and told the story to my father when he came down. The two of them did a good job of helping me deal with it, but trauma is trauma and rarely is there an easy fix.
A few days later I went back to Canada to my apartment with Ali. Well, all the ghosts that I had fended off over my lifetime had just been given the breath of life, personified by one event. I was haunted, there was no doubt in my mind. The first night I insisted on changing sides of the bed so that I was against the wall. I woke up and saw Ali sleeping in the moonlight and thought she was dead, so I woke her up to make sure she wasn’t. After that night I insisted on sleeping with the light on. Later we compromised and left the kitchen light on and the bedroom door open. If she went to bed before me I couldn’t help but wake her up to make sure she was alive. This lasted for a month or two before I was finally able to settle down. Meanwhile I dove right back into my online gaming, more so than ever. I needed to be someplace else dealing with other things.
Life went on in Canada, but I was pretty messed up. Through phone conferences with my psychiatrist in Anchorage I was able to describe to her what was going on. She prescribed new meds and the pharmacy mailed them out to me. Anti depressants, mood stabilizers, sleeping pills, but none of it seemed to work. I bring you now to the part of the prologue where I exit Canada via suicidal ideations, a train, a plane and a hospital.
I was allowed limited access to my laptop in the hospital, but it was enough to keep up with some of my games. Games come and go in the online world it’s just something to get used to. It was hard to deal with at first because I put so much effort into my applications it just felt like a waste of time when I was not selected for the game. But then I started recycling my applications and using the games that I had gotten a character into to add to its background. By this time I had enough characters prepared and saved on my computer that if I needed a new game or lost one or whatever, I would just pull up some files and go fishing in the applications forum. My character backgrounds were typically so complete and thorough that I was accepted to any game I applied for.
I don’t really remember that hospital visit in detail other than Ali breaking up with me a few days in. When I got out it was painfully obvious that I would need a place to stay. Remember John, the guy I drove to Alaska with? Well, he happened to be in a fraternity now and was living at a quasi-frat house. He offered me half of his room for a few hundred a month and I took him up on it. The truck that I had driven up to Alaska had been sold while I was in Canada, but a family friend named Bruce bought a painting from me which enabled me to buy another set of wheels.
Now I had a place to stay and transportation, I just needed a job to keep up with all of it. I ended up getting a job changing oil on cars again, well, washing windows and vacuuming floors more like it. My actual time spent changing oil this time was very minimal. Their training tier was a very slow process. So I had a nine to five or whatever it was, but I couldn’t wait to get home to my computer every day. I formulated posts while I worked, thought about character builds and designed games. There were a few times when I would take off for lunch and decide that I really wanted to play rather than work, so I would call in sick from my lunch break and spend the rest of the day on my computer. I was never actually sick during the few months that I worked there, or was it just one or two? But I was absent several times and all of which were related to my computer and gaming. I quit that job just before I got fired. I hear it is better that way.
I’m an artist anyways, right? Well, my next job was at Michael’s Frame Shop. That was a hoot. I was expecting to walk in to the frame shop and build custom frames, matching colors, you know, put my degree to some use. Nope. All frames orders are sent to some main warehouse where they are manufactured and mailed back to the store wrapped in individual packages. The wood ones came pre assembled so all we had to do was cut glass and put in a backing; very disappointing. Anyways, same story, lots of absences, all related to gaming, quit before I was fired.
Finally I got my big chance at the University of Alaska Anchorage. I was offered an opportunity to teach Beginning Drawing, a real studio class. Six hours a week left plenty of time for me to work online plus they had a computer in the studio so I could check up on things during class. I managed to hold things together for the better part of the semester. I had a few more absences than I should have had but all in all I think the class was a success, more or less.
So winter break had come and I had no money and nothing to do for my family for Christmas. I was expected in Girdwood for a couple of weeks to celebrate Christmas, then New Years and finally my 30th birthday on January 2nd. Yup, I get the whole deal all at once. I’ve always been jealous of summer birthdays, but there’s nothing I can do about that. So back to the Christmas thing; at the very last minute, in fact I was on my way driving to Girdwood, I had a stroke of inspiration. My friend Jeremiah had inherited several Player’s Guides for Dungeons and Dragons over the years and I was hoping that there would be just enough. He and Maggie were gone to the Bahamas, so I let myself into his house, careful to avoid the downstairs, and made straight for the bookshelves in the living room. The room was littered with gaming paraphernalia, a large portion of it was mine anyways so I felt little guilt about snagging enough stuff to outfit each member of my family.
I made it to Girdwood and over the next couple of nights I wrote out character sheets for everyone and put them each in gift bags that I had purchased on my way out. Included in the gift bags were a tube of dice, a mechanical pencil and a Player’s Handbook, all hidden in a bundle of colored tissue paper. I waited until Santa had come and gone and then snuck out to plant my bags of gaming goodness, then went back to my room, which happened to be a walk in closet, and began chatting with the more hardcore elite members of the sites I belonged to about how disappointing it was, sad really that something like Christmas and New Years could have such a dramatic impact on the posting rate of the other players. We were all in agreement that this was just as good a time as any to game and that all the other guys and girls were losers for abandoning their games. I’m pretty sure I offered to run a real time chat game for my buddies, but those never really pan out. By the time they make their sheets the desire is gone, so I ended up disappearing and fell asleep somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five in the morning.
Just a few hours later and I was torn from my much needed sleep. The excitement of Christmas had come and my mother and father were gathering everyone together. It’s strange how things change as you get older. I remember as a boy I was the one rousting mom, dad and my brother for Christmas celebrations. I believe there was a rule in place that I wasn’t allowed to wake anyone up until 6am. Now here I was struggling to open my eyes and they had waited until a much more reasonable 10am and it wasn’t enough. I guess I haven’t talked about my sleeping problems yet, so suffice it to say that I have problems sleeping.
Peeling myself off of the floor I got dressed, checked the forums for activity and, seeing that there was nothing new I went out to the kitchen. The mound of presents was impressive as always, but I was worried about my presents to everyone. I knew my brother would be into it because we had already had conversations about gaming. Everyone else was a wild card. I figured that if I could sell my dad on it that the plan would go ahead, the others I thought would likely be willing to try it once. My brother was nominated to be the elf that year, a title given to the brother whose job it would be to pass out presents to their recipients one round at a time. After a few rounds I decided to make my move and gathered up all the bags and passed them out to everyone in the room, then grabbed a random present for myself. There was a moment of confusion, a laugh from my brother and then an explanation was in order. I explained that the books were not theirs to keep, they were on loan, but everything else was theirs. I went on to say that my gift to everyone was an opportunity to play a game which had become a very big part of my life, that they would play the characters I had written up for them and I would run the game. There was more stuff, including a game mat and a whole gym bag full of goodies.
With unanimous consent to play we sat down to the first game that night. It was interesting to say the least, but it was decided that we would play again the next night, and the next until a week later Melinda had to work in town for a few days, so we called it off due to a missing player. Now I personally can manage, as I said, up to four or five characters on my own, but to ask a first time player to manage any more than one sheet is just wrong. I feel a great sense of delight when I think back to that week. I think that gift was the best gift I have ever given. It brought all of us together for about four hours each night for seven consecutive days. We laughed, there was conflict and conflict resolution, there was camaraderie and an overall sense of togetherness that I consider to be an extended bonding moment, and you know what, even after being a part of a family for thirty years those bonding moments still matter a great deal.
Deep inside I was hurting though. My hallucinations had come back and I was trying to ignore them. There was New Years and my birthday and then I stayed at my brother’s place for a night or two. These are the nights that I had visions of stabbing my throat in the loft, of blood seeping through the wood floor and thoughts of who would find me and how they would get me down. I pushed these thoughts aside as best I could and had made arrangements with my brother to play a solo game one day. He got called off to help edit my father’s paper though and I was left uncertain if this would take just an hour or two or if this was an all day thing. I went over to my parent’s house and busied myself on the computer in my closet getting angrier by the hour. Finally I decided that I needed to confront this situation and went out to the living room where I interrupted them and explained the day that I had planned with my brother and how I felt like they had robbed me of this day and on and on I went. They listened, a little surprised by this emotional outburst coming from me, the quiet one who shies from confrontation as a general rule. When I was finished I panicked and decided that leaving was the best solution, so I stood up but was interrupted by someone saying, “You’ve told us how you feel, now give us a chance to respond…” But I didn’t want a response. I wanted to flee the scene so desperately but all I could do was sit back down. Collectively they explained that this was an ongoing project and it had a deadline that was closing in fast. They apologized for interfering with my plans, but explained the difference of importance in the scheme of things. I took what they said and left, quickly tucking myself into the cocoon of my closet.
I lasted a very short time in there. Too much emotion had been stirred up and my dragon was awake and not at all happy about it. My visions melded with thoughts and I could no longer distinguish whether my thoughts of suicide were happening to me or whether they were the real deal. I put together all of the episodes that I had experienced in my mind and realized then that I had been dealing with suicidal ideations consistently for the entire winter break. It was time to get help. I packed my bag and then started to pack up my laptop but realized that my computer bag was in the kitchen, why I do not know, but there it was. I tried to be quiet and just slip in and out but on the way out my mom spotted me and called out to me. I turned around and it registered that I now had to respond to her question. Her question was simple, but direct, “Josh, are you okay?” I opened my mouth to respond and my eyes flooded with tears. I said, “No, I am not okay. I am going to the hospital.” She insisted I come over to her and then that I sit next to her on the couch. She put her arm through mine and rubbed my forearm with her other hand. It felt both awkward and comforting at the same time, but I still considered this room to be a battle ground and even though these people were my family I had just confronted them. Then my mother did something that I was not expecting; she asked me to tell her what was going on. Usually this was reserved for some private session, but here and now she was asking me to reveal all of it in front of my brother and father, whom had never heard the details before. I felt raw and ill, but decided to do as she requested. I told them about the loft, about shooting myself in the hot tub and about all the things I could think of that I had been contemplating the past month, all of it in full detail.
There were no gasps, nobody called me crazy and nobody seemed scared. Worried, sure, but not scared. We talked about the hospital and decided that it was a Sunday night and we would only get into the Emergency Room. So we worked out a safety watch for me until we could get a hold of my doctor who would then find me a bed in the hospital. Within the next couple of days I was admitted to Providence a second time.
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