(Written by Jer)
In the MUD Aly, aka Lady Jazmin, liked to run quests. She couldn’t hold too many as she only had items that she had gathered on her journeys through Nilgiri to use as prizes, but she liked to have quizzes and give out various potions or equipment as tokens. Occasionally one of the gods would sponsor her and offer some really neat rewards for her quizzes. Well I (Jeremy, aka Saidge) liked to participate and was (and still am) rather knowledgeable when it came to useless information.
After the quizzes the players who had won prizes would receive them and we’d all sit around and chat. It was during these chats that Aly and I really started to click. We started talking about random things and we pinged off each other from the beginning; poking fun at each other and just having a great time. It’s not something I can really explain, but we’ve always been that way in the company of others – we have such a great laugh.
It wasn’t long after that that we’d find excuses to be online more to see each other and hang out, but Aly was due to go to university soon and we wouldn’t see each other online as much. I think it’s important to point out now that Aly was engaged to be married at this point, and we were very strictly friends. But that simple fact took out all of the tension of trying to impress each other. We were just ourselves and we had a good time.
When Aly moved away to university she left her e-mail address on the bulletin board in Nilgiri, and I promptly e-mailed her. I thought she’d have millions of e-mails from everyone on the MUD. She was easily the most popular person there, but she’ll never admit it. She was like a celebrity to me. Still, I guess I was the only one who did send her a real e-mail. Ok so I was biased from the beginning.
A little later down the line and things weren’t going so well for Aly at university. She moved away from home to go to school, and she wasn’t adapting well to the workload, dorm life, and the time she had to spend away from her fiancé, friends, home, and family. Everyone and everything she cared about. So we started trading e-mails. At first it was just normal “Hey how are you?” “I’m great, how are you?” stuff (though I was always rambling about some insecurity or other). After a while though, once Aly started finding it increasingly difficult to cope in her new situation, she started accepting my emotional support. I tried to be there for her as best I could, trying to be a friend while she worked on getting her degree, but the reality was that she felt she was studying the wrong subject and didn’t want to leave and feel like a failure.
There’s a whole lot more to this story, but the important things to note are that Aly came home a few months later suffering from clinical depression, eventually split up with her fiancé, and she was in real danger of isolating herself from everyone and everything, which she probably would have done if not for her mother.