Postaday for January 7th: Oasis
A sanctuary is a place you can escape to, to catch your breath and remember who you are. Write about the place you go to when everything is a bit too much.
It was the summer of too much pizza. I had moved to Seattle, been through a few relationships and a few roommates, and was living alone. A lot of loneliness, a lot of pizza, a lot of video games. One in particular was City of Heroes.
This was my first foray into any kind of online-with-other-people type of thing. I was very timid at first, but got over it, and eventually hooked up with a remarkable group of folks. I’m not going to tell you we all became super best friends or anything like that. I don’t even know their real names, and years later, don’t stay in touch. But during the summer of pizza, they were my tribe.
My character in the game was called Dakota Jones, and he was a Scrapper. Basically that means he fought with his bare hands and healed fast— more or less he was Wolverine. Hours spent roaming the city streets, fighting criminals, earning rep and leveling up. And eating pizza (haven’t really recovered a skinny body yet. Oh well).
I stopped playing as bigger, better things came along, and now, City of Heroes is no longer available. What I long for is a chance to get back in there and just… jump around. One of Dakota’s super-powers was the ability to “leap over tall buildings.” Not flying, per se, but I could steer in mid-air. I would spend hours just jumping around from one sky-scraper to the next, listening to music and not thinking about much.
Nowadays when I need to escape I wind up just browsing the internet. “Escape” is more a state of mind than anything else. I don’t lead the kind of break-neck life that requires any kind of actual physical sanctuary. I work from home, so I’m in this nest for most of the time anyway. No real need to “get away from it all.”
But I’d love to go back to City of Heroes and jump around, soar through the air, land with a satisfying thud under my boots and jump again. That’s what I think of when I think of getting away for a while.