I’m taking an online Writing Your Grief course through refugeingrief.com. Every day there’s a writing prompt that offers a few ideas for us to respond to. Today (January 10, 2018) was Day 3 and I chose to write about “I know where I live.” All of the writing is very personal, of course. Most of it I probably will not share publicly. But here is today’s.
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I know where I live. It's where you don't, anymore. I'm here; you're gone. You should be in this space. I sit at the computer desk. If you had a ghost, it would be here, in this chair, hovering over this keyboard, moving this mouse. Letting the creativity spill from your fingertips through the keys, creating worlds for others to explore. Your games took what was inside of you and made it real, visible, conceivable. Those games, they live on, but you don't. The characters you invented still live. Their hearts beat with zeroes and ones; they continue their quests. They are immortal, I suppose, as much as anything in this world, until its end. I guess that's true of many creations, that they outlive their creators. That's just the way of things.
I know where I live. I live in a quicksand place where it's important to keep moving so I don't get drawn down into the depths. I know that in this place, nowhere I want to go lies along a straight path from where I am. Is there any such thing as progress? Or is it just survival? What is my quest? If I were one of your characters, what would you have me do? What would be my goal? What kind of opposition would I face? Would there be any help available to me along the way?
I know where I live. And that I just have to keep living.