• Most days I don't do anything. I sit on my computer and play video games. Earning virtual money and killing digital creatures. Creating a life that is all my own in a world that doesn't actually exist. But once you start this life, you can never leave it. It becomes a part of who you are and not logging on is spending a day staring at a wall rather than going out with friends.

    You need to check your mail. You have to finish that quest chain, so you can get that new armor, only to do it all over again days later. Proffessions too need leveled. For that, you'll need to go farm, maybe up in the north. That's a good place for that material, right? And what about your guild? Your online friends, your so called, 'guildies'? You need to talk with them too. Let them know you're still active so they don't give you the boot and...hey look, they've just promoted you to an officer. Well isn't that something. You're now partially in charge of something in this false life of yours.

    And this is how my days go by. One by one, leading this virtual life. In an all consuming world that never ends. Never reaches game over, so you can never stop playing. Always, always, one minute at a time. Hours, days, weeks, years of your life consumed. You can't turn back the clock. You don't want to go outside, no face to face social interaction. But hey, you still intereact in the in game chat. That's social interaction. Right? Right? And now you've hit the level cap. You can't go any farther, so you piddle around, make some virtual money, buy some pixels until soon enough, the money isn't only virtual. It's real. Maybe stolen, maybe earned doing odd jobs, maybe actually at a workplace where you spend hours cleaning toilets or flipping burgers to pay for you addiction.

    Because that's what it is. You can't quit. You can never leave. This life has become a part of your daily life and to leave it would be to leave your life behind. And after all that time, so much time. Why would you want to quit? So you start a new character. Level one, all over, from scratch. But this time, instead of working your way up from nothing, you have help. The friends you've made, the money you've made, the professions you've learned. You now have the advantage. And still it consumes your life.

    As mine is still consumed, minutes ticking by. Wasting, being left behind. What tan my skin had is long since gone, nineteen years of summers camping, hiking, fishing, vanished beneath this pale white pallor and pounds of extra weight. Muscles which once were strong have long since reached the point where running thirty feet is a feat, let alone doing any form of physical exercise. So why try? You have another life, one that only needs your fingers to go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on until one day you wake up and realize your life is gone. Wasted in and all consuming world that never end, that goes on without you as the doctors tell you the bad news, even as they lay your casket in the ground with no friends to pay their respects. After all, your friends were virtual, and pixels can't leave the world for which they were created. Chances are, no one even knows, they think you quit, life goes on and your life was wasted. Pity. The life you could have lived would have exceeded the one you had. Pity that you never knew, that all you had to do was turn off the computer to reach your full potential.