Playmates and Soulmates

***Warning...this blog is graphically romantic and could induce a diabetic coma with it's sickly sweetness. Read at your own risk!!!***

There are some who believe that in this world full of anonymous faces, there is one, special person among them waiting to be found. Not in the sense of a misplaced jacket or glove, bundled with other unfortunate personal artifacts in some cosmic lost & found box....but more like an atom randomly bumping through the void, with several billion other atoms doing the same thing. Do they ever find each other....perhaps to create the most euphoric of molecules? *shrugs* Maybe...maybe not...

How maddening would that be? Leaving the fate of your ultimate happiness to random chance?

Consider this...that no two people on this planet are the same. Even genetic twins have differences in what they like or dislike. Is it realistic to expect that we would be able to find the yin to our yang, the peanut butter to our jelly, the...well you get the idea...with odds like that? Also...people aren't inert. Over time, priorities change, experiences push them in completely opposite directions and what once might have fit...might not be a good fit a millisecond later. Getting complicated isn't it?

Luckily, I don't believe there is just one for each of us...but many such chances.

I have been most fortunate as I have met three. None of them had anything in common with the other except for my immediate reaction to them, the comfortable feeling that all was right in the world when we were together and the pain of parting...almost as if a part of me had been torn away.

The first was when I was young...about 17 years old. His high school band was doing an exchange program with my high school band and when I saw him...it was like somebody had handed me a live wire to hold. Was he beautiful? To my eyes. Was he what other girls would sigh over...probably not. Robin was far too brainy and caustic for most of my friends...the very same things that usually alienated me from my peers.

Unfortunately, it would never develop into anything more than what it was. Distance and youth would prevent that...not to mention the untimely strike of the Canadian postal service. But ten years later, we would have lunch together in a restaurant in downtown Toronto. I was visiting the area and managed to find him. A decade hadn't done much for tamping down that electrical charge when I first saw him and he smiled at me. I was amazed by that. We laughed and talked and slipped into our old comfortable relationship for two wonderful hours...and then we went back to our own lives. Saying goodbye a second time left me a bit wistful...but at peace. I realized I hadn't been wrong about what he had meant to me...just this time around it wasn't meant to be.

The second was in my early thirties, happily married...for the most part. My husband was a decent man, but with all the imagination of a Pez dispenser. This was just who he was and despite my attempts to include him during my IRC hours with my insane friends, he preferred the company of Mr. Seagrams and Mr. McGillicuddy at our local bar. He preferred their company A LOT.

It was while I was dividing my attention between an afternoon online chat and a book that I had my nose in that Otter made his entrance. He dashed into the room...yelled something totally off the wall and dashed out. If I'd had whiskers like a cat, they would have been quivering with barely contained curiosity. "Who was that?!" I asked a friend. "Oh...that's just Otter doing what he usually does," she replied with a smile.

And that was the beginning of the best friendship in my life...

There are soul mates and then there are playmates. Otter was perhaps the first true best friend I'd ever had...even though I had thought I'd never been lacking in that department growing up. Even though he was half a world away, there was a connection between us that defied logic. When I would try to imagine that connection, in my mind's eye I always saw two tin cans with a very, very...err...very long string connecting them. In Australia, Otter would be saying something into his end...and on the other side of the planet, I could feel that vibration...in of all places, my belly button (which as Donnie will attest to is a 'no touch zone'...it's just far too sensitive).

On our own, we never lacked for an imagination...but together, we were like two children on a chocolate high playing make-believe. And trust me...when you are playing this game in a world like IRC, there are no boundaries to the adventures you can have. People would often accuse us of having a script beforehand...and I suppose that was a compliment. LOL! Whether we were tormenting the folks in christian-chat, rolling around as two peas through every chat channel on the server or doing one of our infamous skits on Captain Eject and Superchihuahua his sidekick, I can assure you it was most definitely impromptu. *sigh*

Real life has a way of forcing even the most recalcitrant children (despite their age) into growing up. There's a time for play and a time for...umm...not playing, I guess. Our friendship was taking its toll on the latter and so Otter cut the line between our tin cans. Occasionally I still feel a faint vibration though...and I know that he's not forgotten.

As for myself, I never could have cut that line. I felt bereft without my best friend despite the fact that many silly men tried to step in and prove that they were childish too. It was not the same. There is no other Otter in this world but Otter...and it was better to be without him than to try and patch the emptiness with a false one.

And after having reached that pinnacle of completeness, I had resigned myself to never having that feeling again. To ask for that magic to strike not once, not twice...but three times, seemed somehow greedy and probably at the expense of somebody else's chances.

So there I was, playing on the computer...some silly escapist game called Everquest. Our group needed a rogue to assist us...yes, literally...a rogue and since I was the person that seemed to have the gift for talking complete strangers into joining us, it was up to me to pull up a list and throw a mental dart at one of the names and then send them a message.

His name...Horok. And as we were playing alongside one another he started to sing the words to Green Acres and my whiskers began that nasty twitching again...

He is neither an Otter nor a Robin...and if he'd tried to be either, this story would have ended even before it began. He is a Donnie. And the adventures that we have, span the best of both worlds...from the slaying of beast and enemy in a fantasy computer game to a hot air balloon ride over the desert.

In the void, we'd sped by each other numerous times...missing each other by mere fractions of time or distance. I truly believe that if we'd bumped into each other before that one particular moment, the fit wouldn't have been right. But here we are...a molecule.

For the first time in my life...I have my soul mate AND my playmate...and he's the same person. Isn't life grand?