Lots more musing last night…figuring this all out for me has been another one of those head rushes… I like that word better. I changed it in the previous post too. Not to mention digging through my archive as I started to remember more details…
So… back to 18 years ago… yeah, that long. Off he went to Kosovo, didn’t hear anything for some time, not till early August, some 5 weeks later or so when he first showed up in IRC to my surprise and we chatted a bit. But I just continued doing what I was doing, He had said before he left that I would probably surpass him in UCIP. “Yeah right,” is what I thought, “I’ll take your word for it,” is what I replied :D.
But as usual he was close at least with his assessment, I ended up starting my own SIM, got it approved in record time and was really have a good time… something I would never have dreamed of being able to do a year prior. At the time, I didn’t surpass, but I did level up… and that was a whole new ball game. No longer so much mentor / mentee, but more friends talking about all the stuff that was going on. I still saw him as an advisor, and there are few more capable story tellers than he is… hence whenever he starts a creative endeavour, I want to be part of it. Because I know I will learn new things, stretch myself in ways I would not have done on my own… because the challenges were still being thrown at me from, new bigger pictures to be looked at. The main difference was that there were no more panic attacks, or very very few.
But there were still head rushes.. plenty of them. We ended up on the same wavelength where SIMming and the group were concerned… and that was the biggest rush of them all. To be on the wave length and inside someone’s head for which you have so much respect and admiration… and who is such a good friend in the mean time…. Amazing feeling. The associated personal growth on my part was amazing.
In the mean time, I ended up moving to Germany in 2001, and only 60 km away from where he was stationed. We managed to meet up a hand full of times and whenever we met up face to face we would not stop talking… 98% was about the group, SIMming, how to improve things, and stuff like that… After the politics got too much somewhere in early 2002 we ended up co-founding a new SIM group in the Enterprise Era… I ended up moving to Italy in April, he did another deployment in Kosovo before being reassigned to the US.
Somewhere in 2003 he disappeared off line, we’d been friends through out the end of his last marriage which hadn’t survived his 1999 deployment to Kosovo and he had remarried prior to his departure from Germany. Turned out his new wife was extremely jealous. He stopped SIMming in 2006 when he went on another deployment, and didn’t return from SIMming. I didn’t hear from him at all. Given the marital situation no surprise. All we ever were was just friends, but very good friends.
Funny thing that happened is, that I had left a message for him in Yahoo IM when that existed somewhere in late 2007, and I had never received a received a reply. We hadn’t talked since he stopped SIMming in 2006, when I suddenly got an angry email from his wife telling me that he spent 16 hours a day online, and if he was having an online affair with me… LOL. I happened to be in Mexico at the time for a business trip, and he showed up in Yahoo IM and we chatted for a while, he had heard about the email his wife had sent and wanted to apologise. It was good to chat. I replied to her that if he was doing that, he wasn’t doing it with me, since I hadn’t heard from him in over a year. It was obvious to me the marriage was not going too well. But hey.. that was his business. He did like his women passionate.. personally, I think this was a bit too much, even for him. And if nothing else, it showed me that that wave length was still there for a large part.
At the end of 2010, Bo introduced me to LOTRO and I was hooked almost immediately… Bo had said he was on a US server, but I didn’t know which one, and he was off line for a few days when i joined. So I joined Landroval, and while reading through the LOTRO forums, I saw someone’s signature quote that made my neck hair stand up-right…. when I looked at some of the notes written by that person, there was no doubt at all.
Our paths were converging again for a while. We connected again and just picked up where we had left off. I had created two Elven toons to start with and joined the kinship that he was in and tried something new for the first time… RP in the Tolkien world… as always, it was exhilarating to learn new things and open my mind to stuff… like the good ol’ days.
He had finally left the army a couple of years prior and ended up taking a civilian position with the department of defence and was going to move to Seoul. When SWTOR came out he stopped playing LOTRO, I tried it out, but I got bored after 6 weeks or so, and continued with LOTRO as my main game. He ended up going to Seoul in 2012 I think, and I didn’t hear anything since then.
Until a week or two ago, all of a sudden, his nick turned up on the top of my friends list when sorted by when the last time online… it hadn’t even been on the first page of it for years… I had missed him by minutes. And then last week, when I was in the hospital, and thus online in the day time… we actually managed to reconnect. It’s been good. He is back to playing LOTRO, our paths are converging again, at least for a while. And as usual, I’ve been smiling and happy to catch up.
And also been so nostalgic this time. I am always happy to reconnect, because somehow, I always learn something new and see personal growth (which is what gives the head rushes). This time it has been more the figuring out the dynamic of our friendship, we are so different in so many ways, such different personalities, different walks of life, yet here we are 19 years later… chatting away like before. And the biggest difference is that this time, we have talked for more than half the time about personal stuff. About what happened over the last few years, about politics, about travel, Seoul (since I visited twice for work back in 2007/2008 time frame). And he eventually separated from his wife in 2015, hence being able to chat without having to worry about her feelings! The rest of the time, I have been able to help bring him up to speed with the changes in LOTRO over the last 4-5 years.
Last night, I spent several hours digging through my archives (mail, log files from the early UCIP days) for details of some of the memories that suddenly had started popping up again. And that was a head rush, remembering the panic attacks, and the growth and the head rushes…. I woke up in the middle of the night for my usual bio break and ended up awake several hours as things started to make sense and I started to understand the dynamic better. I started debating if I should say anything of this to him, and decided that IF, then either in an email, or perhaps a voice conversation…
This morning, he showed up while I was already playing, and he asked if I had like a voice channel, like Teamspeak (TS)…. That wave length is still there… perhaps a bit weaker as before but give it some time. So, I gave him the details of the one in use of my kin (since I pay for that anyway), and we hung out for ages in Teamspeak having voice conversations (something we’d not done since we were both in Germany in 2002) while each doing our own thing in LOTRO. And based on that, we are still so aligned on many things, despite all the differences in our lives and who we are as persons… that is what still keeps amazing me.
I haven’t decided yet if I should say anything, and if what sort of details or in what format. I’m just relishing in the head rush of catching up again, and the potential of some joint creative stuff in the form of some Elven RP with our old kin.
I’m happy our paths converged again… as I always have been about it! Long may they stay converged!