"Spring Cleaning"

Dear Diary,

It's Beltane. It's a time of renewal, of plants blossoming again after the long winter. It's a time to clean out the dead wood, and plant new seeds for the coming year.

I could not have chosen a better day for what I need to do.

I chose this day simply by accident. It was Linden Lab's fault really. My tier billing day is the 15th of the month. In the whirlwind of things that happened at the end of March, I looked at this piece of land that I'd rented, and tried to decide when would be a good time to try and buy it.

April 15th would be too hectic. With taxes being due, and only a couple weeks until then, I felt that wasn't really enough time to get comfortable with selling off my old land parcel in Healy, and saying goodbye to the store that used to be there, plus I wanted to give Mari, Pygar, and even Robin a chance to get used to the idea of me as a neighbor, and decide if they were ok with it. Plus, as we'll talk about later, I wanted to give Mommy every chance to get back into contact.

 May 15th seemed a more reasonable date to buy the land, and the midway point of course, between tier dates, was the perfect time to make that decision, to begin those actions, and start making decisions to move forward with my life.

May 1. Beltane.

I hadn't wanted to buy land, to commit to 'living alone'. In the event that Mommy did return, I didn't want her to find me living 'too comfortably' on my own, lest the idea occur to her that I was happier without her.

She didn't return.

My heart tells me that all the things she told me were going on, were the absolute truth. My years of experience on the internet and in SL tells me that some of the things she told me might have been only partially true. Either way, one thing is absolutely certain.. she's been gone a very long time.

Our last pixels-to-pixels meeting was on February 21st (my time). We traded notecards on March 4, and at that time there was talk about getting back online "next weekend", but it never happened.

Things really haven't felt stable since camp... and if I'm honest with myself, a couple of weeks prior to camp. That's when Mommy and Cordello (our nickname for the Cory/Modello/Atuhi/etc alt party that was "her boyfriend") broke it off, and it's around that time that my Aunts decided to stop playing family with us too. The house then became very quiet.. just Mommy, Me, and the prim Sibs. It's also then that the first of three major emotional impacts hit Mommy's life, and she began withdrawing.

What happened in her real life is important to her, and if what she told me happened actually did happen.. I can't judge her for losing interest in SL. Heck, just the loss of the majority of our family was more than enough reason.. and my taking off for a whole week certainly didn't help.

The bottom line is, she's not here anymore, and I need to accept that, and begin moving on.

What is "moving on" gonna mean? Well to start with, I'm going to stop setting her place at the table. That's an analogy of course, but what I mean is, it's time to stop 'waiting for Mommy to come back', to stop holding my breath, and to consider that yes, our family RP seems to be over and if I want to play family again, I'm going to need to do that with someone else.

It might be easy for some kids to fall into the trap of being resentful.. all the words are there.. "Abandoned" "Orphaned", etc. But I don't feel that way.

If everything she said was true, then she had every reason to be away, and I'm sure coming back to SL after an absence could feel overwhelming, especially with so much of our family having been lost, and eventually even our house.

If none of the things she said were true, then she still had her reasons for being away, and she chose to soften the blow of why. Up til March 4th, she was still making plans with me to return and rebuild.. but for whatever reasons she wasn't able to do so.

Experience suggests that it's a mix of both. Bad things happened, SL time was hard to come by, and as more time passed, and free time was found, it became harder to get the motivation to take on the tasks needed to resurrect SL.. which got bigger and more difficult the more time passed.

In the end, there's no blame. RealLife™, an alt, shifting interests.. whatever it was, took her focus away from what we were doing.. and I can't blame her for that. I still like her, I still care for her, and I do love and miss her, and while I'm closing the door on what we had, I'm not locking it.

But as I said before, today is a day of renewal: of endings and beginnings.

I have some unpleasant tasks to undertake today.. removing fragments of that family RP, and getting myself ready for the next stage. I'll have to make some changes to the blog here today, and some other things.. cleaning up the pieces that are.. in the end.. no longer needed. My profile's gonna need some work too.

But as unpleasant as these tasks are to have to perform, it's been a long time coming. Closure is, in itself, rewarding in a way. It's work that's a touch overdue now.. and it feels good to be getting it done before it gets any harder.