~ Kartis and Kalam ~
Chapter one
Chapter two
Emotions?
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
~ Contact Kartis Shone ~
~ Kartis & Kalam, Chapter two ~
Chapter 2 - Emotions?
Kalam and Kartis met almost every time when I was playing EverQuest. After playing I usually chatted for a while with Richard, the player behind Kalam. It was never difficult to talk with him, and I never felt uncomfortable talking about difficult matters. Talking with Richard was the channel for letting out my sadness over my relationship. Richard let me read his poems that he wrote. I understood that he felt sad as well. We laughed, discussed music and poetry, cried and laughed again in every chat. In the game we explored the EverQuest world, got killed a few hundred times, laughed and had so much fun.
After a few weeks of playing EverQuest and chatting with Richard I started to notice that I really needed to meet Richard/Kalam as often as possible. If he wasn't there when I logged in I got very disappointed, almost irritated, and when he was there I jumped up and down from happiness. At first I didn't reflect much about it. But after a while I got worried about my mental health. I was afraid that I started to have emotions for a cartoon character that I met almost every day on the Internet. I tried to tell myself that these so called feelings only were pure imagination coming from hunger for love and attention. I simply tried to forget about it.
The more I tried to forget about that I was so excited over meeting Kalam the worse it got. I was afraid of talking to anyone about it since I didn't know if I was going crazy. What if my friends would suggest for me to meet a psychologist? I really couldn't afford that after paying all Internet bills. I was wondering if Richard had similar feelings since he always wanted to play the game together with me and never deserted me. One day I decided to ask him about it and also tell about my own struggling feelings.
After a long talk over the Internet, trying to insinuate what I wanted to ask him about, I finally told him about my feelings, my doubt about "having feelings for a cartoon character", and the pain from feeling this way since I was living together with my fiancé. I wanted to hear him saying that he was having similar feelings, and at the same time I wanted him to say that all was in my imagination, that he was just a friend with whom I played a game on the Internet. He said neither of it. The only answer I got was that he didn't want to interfere with my relationship. If I was frustrated before I got even more frustrated by this answer. I had thought that he was struggling with the same painful feelings, but we were sitting on different sides of the planet, me already involved in a relationship. And now he didn't seem to be more than my Internet friend. There was no reason at all for me to feel this way.
I felt so stupid. And I felt so unfair to my fiancé. I decided to not play EverQuest for a while. I needed time to sort out my thoughts and feelings, and I needed to sleep. Richard and I always met during the very late nights in Sweden, since that was the time when Richard came home from his job. There are 9 hours difference between California and Sweden, and I didn't get much sleep because of that. After only a week of not visiting the Internet I just had to talk to Richard again and logged into the game to see if he was there. He was. He told me he almost went crazy from not seeing me the latest few days. I understood he felt the same as I did.
So we started talking about this difficult matter. Richard insisted he wanted to meet me in real life. I told him it was impossible. As long as I was living with my fiancé there was no possibility of meeting. He couldn't come here and I didn't have any money to go to California. It all felt like a combination between cheating and being childishly in love with an impossible person that I had never seen. I knew I had to leave my relationship with my fiancé, but there were no reasons to start over with a guy I met in game on the Internet!?!?! This was more than confusing.
However I decided one day to brake up my relationship. All of you readers who have ever been in this situation know how much struggling and pain it is to brake up and leave. The one that is left can't understand and his world seems to fall apart. The one that is breaking up feels like the most horrible person in the world to put someone he/she has loved in this position. Either way you try to make it honest or good, it always turns out to be the worst way ever. After 7 years of living together this was a very painful brake-up.
I moved to a friend's apartment. Richard wanted to visit me as soon as possible. I wasn't sure if it was a good idea so soon after I left my relationship. I was also afraid of a total failure when we met. However I agreed to have Richard as my guest for a month during the summer. There were many difficulties before he had a date decided to come. It would take me a few homepages to tell all about it so I will leave all that out. One thing I was concerned about though was: "What if we don't like each other when we meet face to face?" If this happened we had to stand each other for a month before he could go back. And what if we really like each other? He still has to leave after a month's visiting. What would people think about me having an unknown man visiting shortly after I broke up from my old relationship?
~ Meny ~
