Harpies

I’ve been thousands of different places, and they all have a special place in my memory. Some, like trips to the cold doctor’s office when I was a little boy still instill fear and panic when I see them, and others, like the location of my first kiss, force a smile to creak and crack my sullen pout regardless of my glum demeanor. It never occurred to me that these places didn’t have to exist for them to impact me.

I play the online game World of Warcraft on a regular basis, and while Ashley and I were dating, she got into it, too. Our first real characters together were Kuu (me) and Xuu (her), twin Tauren Druids (bipedal cows that transform into all manner of beasties). We had a deal, where we would only play those characters when the other was playing, so we would stay the same level and do the same quests. It was great fun, and it also let us form a bond that extended past the physical into the virtual.

After about a week of playing on-and-off, we had reached the Barrens. Think of the Serengeti, a large, dry, relatively flat region, filled with lions, hyenas, zebras, giant lizards that shoot lightning, and all manner of centaur—okay, so it’s not exactly like the Serengeti, but you get the picture. We were asked to kill a tribe of harpies that had been terrorizing some of the settlements there, so we bought supplies and headed off to the northern part of the Barrens. Together, Ashley and I fought tooth-and-claw with the dastardly harpies, claiming their twisted claws as our own, as proof of our deed.

We managed to mangle most of the harpies’ claws to unrecognizable lumps of bird-flesh with our powerful bear jaws, so it took us quite a while to gather enough claws to prove we had done the deed. It was really fun, and oftentimes they would overwhelm us, forcing us to work together as a team, healing each other while fighting to our best ability, and through the countless battles, Ashley and I strengthened our relationship even more. We had a great time.

Flash forward to last night. I was playing a rogue character, sneaking around the Barrens and pilfering whatever quest items I could find, when I checked the next quest I had to do: I had to kill harpies.

As soon as I saw the harpy camp, large tear-shaped nests suspended from the branches of near-dead trees, I felt strangely sad. All the time we spent questing there had really impacted my life, and I couldn’t help but cry softly as the memories of the adventures we’d shared came rushing back with a shock, just as surprisingly and suddenly as a rainstorm in the Barrens. I sulked around and slit the throat of many harpies, all the time wishing Ashley was there to cheer me on.