The Ravens Nest

The Story of A Friend’s Powerful But Unsung Moment

I want to tell you all about a friend of mine. I’ll call her by her character name, Ana. Ana’s the type of girl who’s nerdy side is a bit of a guilty pleasure for her and to reveal that to anyone is to show a great deal of trust by exposing her vulnerability for two reasons; first, not many of her friends, save for her closest, knows she really loves to play out these characters and their stories and secondly, there’s a type of story she really likes to play out most. We’ll get to that in a moment.

In real life, Ana’s the type of woman who was always interested in my stories from the days I worked in a prison. She also loved one story in particular, the time I actually visited a women’s prison during one of my regular shifts. You can view that story here. Ana would often get me to tell this story by introducing me to a new friend nearly every time or even a group of friends so now, they’re all having a laugh at my expense but Ana, I noticed, seemed to take care to listen.

Finally, one day, I asked her why she was always so fond of that story and that’s when I found out why. She was absolutely fascinated by the inner workings of one of these places. I’d introduced her to Second Life and she didn’t really get it at first but when I mentioned she could engage in that type of role-playing in SL, she immediately began learning everything she could on how to play properly in there, how to emote, how to fix up her avatar, make outfits, change them, how to deal with a mesh body and mesh clothing later, etc. If she was going to insert herself into this type of role-playing (storygaming, as it were) she wasn’t going to be disruptive. She invited me to join her and I really didn’t care to but eventually I did only to find out that she’d modelled her avatar after the woman I talked about in my story. There were some differences. Her character was taller, a bit more tanned in complexion and a bit more mature than her real-life counterpart.

Her character was a former USAF Captain who may or may not have been framed for the crime for which she had been convicted and sentenced to life. She’d fallen into the routine, the transfers and played the character through a small handful of these sims off and on for a few years but there was one scene in particular that stands out in my mind that she played as I sat off to the side and watched.

There’s a bit of backstory to this particular scene. Her character had always been this calm source of strength. She was observant, intelligent, knew where the boundaries were and knew how to get what she wanted and/or needed. She wasn’t manipulative, in fact, she had become sort of a den mother to a few other inmates to the point where her nickname was “Mama” and she considered those who called her that to be family. According to her, when asked, she was doing life because she wouldn’t sleep with her boss. She had scars as a result of a deployment or two during her time in the military. One of her own died protecting her. Her unit and she were close. Think of the movie Aliens when everyone is just coming out of cryosleep and they’re busting on each other, nothing’s taboo, everything is out in the open. That’s what they were like. She was especially close to the one who ended up taking many bullets for her during an ambush. As she put it in character, the only crime she’d ever committed was killing the man who killed the man who died defending her. She’s the one that had to arrange the military funeral, amongst other things. Her entire life was about duty and there was no time to really mourn.

Until this scene. We’ll get to that though because there’s more.

She’d also lost everything being sent up like that and then, the very man who levelled charges against her was killed in a nightclub in a moment of impropriety. Draw your own conclusions. If any character in any story was without hope, it was hers. At one point, she decided that the character would have a complete nervous break. Not a screaming fit or anything so over-the-top but the nightmares would intensify, followed by a sort of agoraphobia that she couldn’t explain. Her hands would shake, she would stammer and it would take time for even the most basic of thoughts to be relayed.

Finally, she was referred to the institution’s psychiatrist. Now, we get to that scene.

There’d been a few sessions before this one but I remember this one specifically. She’s telling the story about how her subordinate and friend would hang out even when the rest of her squad was out and about doing other things, pursuing other interests. The two of them would be out having fun before the deployment happened. During the deployment, the ambush would occur and a man had burst out from a building with a Kalashnikov aimed for her. Her friend jumped in between them just in time and she spun only to see, in horror as her friend was unceremoniously gunned down and she became temporarily pinned beneath his rather heavy frame. She wrestled his sidearm from his holster and herself out from under him only to find that the killer’s rifle had jammed and then she proceeded to unload the magazine into him. To hear her tell it, it’s the only true crime of which she was actually guilty and it haunted her every night. More so, now than ever.

The psychiatrist had come out from behind her desk and gotten close to her as she strained to tell the story. Her emotive posts were a tear-filled portrait of that one moment of her past shredding her apart from the inside.

When the psychiatrist asked her the question of, “If you could tell him anything, if he were standing here right now, what would it be?”

That’s when the dam inside ruptured and it all came pouring out. You’ve heard the term “Ugly Crying” and this was it. Over and over and over again, all she could say in character through the tears was “I’m sorry.”

I asked Ana after it was all over why she’d chosen to take her character who was really a good example of what a strong, female character should be and obviously I’m leaving things out because to tell every aspect of that story would stretch you on into days of reading, however, it was this moment and this particular aspect of the story she was playing out that intrigued me. Why take a character like that who was the picture of strength and reduce her in such a way? She told me that she wasn’t reducing her, she was revealing what was underneath. This was a real moment of vulnerability for the character. It was a gaping wound that had never properly healed. It was an aspect of the life she’d left behind and chose to leave it that way, not because she was discarding her old life out of hopelessness but to protect herself and she just couldn’t hold the shield up any longer.

It took me awhile to really process that. A couple of days, actually. She’d only been playing the character maybe three or four years at the most but she had taken more time than that and had managed to condense it into that one moment where the evidence was clear, she’d been too strong for far longer than she should have. It was a false sense of strength and security. She’d faked it, made it and it was slowly killing her. From a player perspective, she also didn’t want to be a one-trick pony, which I get but when it clicked, I’d understood.

When experiencing those breakdowns, it’s not because we’re weak, it’s because our strengths aren’t infinite. Sooner of later, muscles fail, no matter how strong they are, the endurance runs out, the stamina just isn’t there. In essence, our times of rest must come, and come they will, whether we want them to or not. When you’ve put it off for too long, that very moment of rest won’t give you the choice.

For Ana’s character, this was that moment.

Thanks for reading, I know it was kind of a long way to get there but if you hung in there, I really appreciate it. It’s been a story on my mind recently and no idea why but I did feel like sharing it. Hopefully you took something from it too.

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