Eshi, remembered
The first time I met Eshi Otawara in SecondLife, it was a pretty dark day for me. I was in the depths of a deep depression that had set in sometime around the time that my divorce was finallized. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but Eshi was in the middle of her “1 hour sim” project. It was early in the morning where I live; I had not slept most of the previous night, and was dreading having to face another day at work. I was with a friend in SecondLife who was trying to cheer me up. We had found a pair of maracas that made you dance funny if someone said “manbo!” in the room, and we were cracking ourselves up hysterically. I don’t remember whose idea it was to go visit Eshi’s build, but I remember that we arrived just after she had wiped the sim clean to start over. I think Crap was there, and someone else. We started chatting, and then the maracas came out, and it got silly very quickly. By the end of it, Eshi had friended me.
To be perfectly honest, I had no idea who she was or how famous she was in the SecondLife community. I didn’t even know she made clothes. A few days later, I just casually mentioned to another friend that I had met Eshi, and the response was full of the kind of fannish fawning that probably is a big factor in Eshi’s eventual discorporation. But I never knew her as “THE Eshi Otawara;” to me, she was just Eshi, a person on my friends list. Only later did I realize that she really was a big deal, like when I invited her over to a small party only to have Pathfinder Linden show up and spend the evening in my virtual home.
The first time I met Irena Morris in real life, she threw her arms around me and hugged me. By contrast to our first meeting in SL, our RL meeting at SLCC ’08 was a very good time for me; a few weeks earlier, I had met another SL friend for the first time in RL, and we were on our way to becoming partners in both worlds. I still remember Eshi’s beautiful smile, sitting at a table under an umbrella on the hotel grounds in Tampa. I only knew her from SL at the time; I didn’t know a lot of her back-story; the tragedy of losing her husband, the resulting problems with her residency status, the struggle to make a full-time living in SecondLife, these were all things that were hinted at but never a the focus of our conversations in SecondLife.
I won’t say that I knew Eshi well, and I can’t yet say that I know Irena well, but I’m honored to have known Eshi while she was active in the metaverse, and I’m certainly glad that I know Irena, whom I consider a good friend. I’ll miss Eshi in SecondLife; It may take a while for me to be able to wear the clothes that she’s made again. I understand why she’s chosen to leave SecondLife now; it’s not what I would have done, but I’m not Eshi. We all have to choose the path that we take as we muddle through these worlds we’ve made. I wish her the best, and hope that our paths cross again.
