Escape

It's lightly said, a joking expression, in the retelling of a coworker's family medical drama.  How once the ill family member was in safe hands at the hospital, rather than stay in that chaotic circus of concerned relatives and distressed friends, the coworker was relieved to return to work.  "Welcome to normal," my husband told her, acknowledging he knew exactly how she felt.  How returning to work and normalcy felt so good.  It's not the first time he's said it, and I know it to be true.  To be essential to his coping.  Still it twists me inside, hurts sharply, burns with the unfairness of all of this, that life with me has become this constant struggle and worry from which he needs to escape, even for a few hours a day, because nothing about our life at home is normal.  Normal like work, where there are only every day concerns, employee needs, customer complaints, nothing life-or-death serious. 

At first, wallowing in this moment of self-pity I'm having, I can't think what my own escape is.  How do I get away from this flawed body and the cancerous threat inside it, bent on my destruction?  Where can I go except in my own head to escape the fear and the weakness and the mortality I feel?  It takes a few moments to realize the simple answer before me.  The Game, they call it in the hilarious parody web show created by Felicia Day.  It is most definitely my escape.  

In the World of Warcraft I assume the identity of a fearless fighting veteran, a lithe night elf who never has trouble walking.  She runs with ease, leaps gracefully, transforming when needed to the form of a powerful, stalking leopard, a ferocious, protecting bear, or a swiftly traveling stag.  At sea she takes the form of an orca, moving faster than her feebly swimming foes.  In battle she uses magics to bring down her enemies, and to revitalize and heal her wounded allies.  And when, as I did in my childhood, she stands atop some height and takes that fateful leap, she doesn't hit the ground hard, as I did over and over again.  She blurs into the form of a great stormcrow, and she flies away.  The freedom that only the endless sky can bring is hers, and thus mine.  

In the company of her brave companions, whose players have become friends that have supported me like any present in the "real" world would, she challenges monsters big and small, and should any of them be felled in combat, they are easily brought back to life again to carry on the adventure.  It is the ultimate and perfect escape for someone like me, full of satisfying social interaction, equal parts epic action and storytelling, and when it comes to the difficult raid content, a great deal of effort invested to get hard-won treasures and glory.  And in Warcraft, unlike life, death never keeps its victims.  

So what if my husband feels relief to arrive at his office.  We all have our refuges.  And when this is all too much for him, it's not his desk he collapses on for comfort.  It is me, and it is me who holds him while he shakes from sobs that make no sound, and it is me who promises never to give up, never to leave him here without a fight.  That we will make our final escape from this world the way we originally planned, together, our last breath expiring at the same moment in the wrinkled infirmity of our old age, never to face a day of grief from one of us living without the other.