We went to a LARP (Live Action Role Playing) this weekend, Mistress' parents took care of little S and we were away all Saturday into the night, we didn't get home until two. Except for something very akin a hangover because of the sleep disruption (the event didn't allow any alcohol, so it must have been the sleep-thing) it was great.
The thing is, me and Mistress met for the first time during the preparations before a LARP in 1997. I was seventeen, she was 26 and the oldest of the group of four who invited me to join them in playing soldiers in a fantasysetting depicting two army camps fighting over a small village. It was my first event, and it was life changing for me. I found friends and an interest that stills holds me, and I finally somehow found a place were I fit in. The LARP itself lasted for five days that time (that's a long long time to be playing, actually) but the consequenses lasted a life time.
Mistress and the others were involved in one specific society, a small organisation with something like 50 members, and I joined too. I did a lot of other stuff too, I participated in making a magazine about larping and went to a lot of different types of events with different settings and was very involved in the hobby for a few years in my early twenties.
Eventually I toned down my commitment and focused more on real life things, like getting a job and with time getting in to the university program I'm attending now. I started the relationship with my ex, and Mistress entered into it as the third party- much inspired actually by an event we participated in, were the setting was S/F and everyone lived in marriages of four people. That's one way larping changes lifes - it illustrates things that could be, allows one to try and feel and experience different realities, different solutions.
But all the time, I was still a member of this first society, or at least a hangaround - I haven't paid the members fee every year since -97, but I have been connected to it all the time. 2001, if I remember correctly, Mistress and I organised our first own event in this society, that focuses on one specific made up fantasy-world, that has been consistent since 1985, and lives in the hearts and heads of the players who creates an re-creates it at and in-between events. It's somehow both my own creation and my second home, as well as belonging to all my friends.
When I got pregnant and little S was born, we more or less stopped. We went to a few events, once when little S was four months old and Mistress participated once alone a while later. But our hearst wasn't in it, and we both decided that we didn't want to play our characters anymore. They had been around for a while, mine for eight years but Mistress' for something like twenty years. And still, for a variety of reasons, it was time to end them. So we did, on those events. Both were actually brutally murdered, in two unrelated scenes, by the evil evil bastards that always in exists in fantasy settings about epic struggles between good and evil.
But now, it's time to start again, and it makes me really really happy. Something has been missing from our lifes. It wasn't really a voluntary hiatus from our hobby, it was a forced on, a result of us bowing to the inevitable of sleeplessness and sickness and a gruesome workload. Having a kid was something like a thousand times more work and pain than I ever thought it would be. Not to mention pregnancy and delivery... It's not until now we have the time and energy to focus on something that isn't day to day stuff, firmly related to our reality.
And for some reason, we need this escapism. It was so great seeing Mistress doing something fun, something besides taking care of little S or me or working. She's so responsible, so hardworking, so very very conscientous - it was a relief simply to see her do something she likes, for herself. I'm better at that most days, I've kept breathing holes for myself, but she hasn't in many ways, and I'm so glad the pressure is letting up a bit.
We made new characters that was great fun to enact, and we had good equipment, we finally finished some things that has been waiting for us (I made a scabbard for a long sword I got for my twentieth birthday but haven't been able to use because I've had nothing to keep it in, for one thing) and I was proud of us. And the best thing is that we'll be able to keep these characters in the future, and keep playing them in a campaing friends of ours are organising for the next year or so, maybe once every third month. I'm so excited about that.
In a way it feels like getting my life back. My life, the one it appeared I accidentally traded in when we decided to become parents. I didn't get a child because I disliked my previous life, and I grieved that loss quite a lot when I realised what had happened during that first year we had little S. Now it seems it may have been a more temporary thing than I thought it was. I hope so!
This is me, and it's not until I got it back that I realised just how much it meant to me, to my feeling of being myself, and to my happiness. Getting out of this world now and then makes it so much better to live in.
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