Not every turning point announces itself. Some arrive quietly, without urgency or spectacle. This is one of those moments.
from Chapter 19.
Nothing important happened to me the first time I met Ken.
That is not false modesty or revision. It is the truth.
There was no spark. No pause in time. No internal shift announcing significance.
He was a name.
An avatar.
One person among many.
By then, Second Life was a world I moved through without thinking much about it. Clubs, DJs, friends, photography, Bloodlines, late nights that wandered from one place to another depending on where everyone happened to be.
There was always something going on.
I wasn’t looking for a relationship.
I wasn’t really looking for anything.
Photography had become one of the things I loved most. I could lose hours setting up a shot, changing the light, trying poses, moving the camera a fraction at a time until something finally looked the way I wanted it to.
And when I wasn’t doing that, I was usually with friends. That was how I met Ken.
A group of us were playing Greedy.
He was there with his girlfriend. I spoke more to her than I did to him.
He said hello. I said hello back. That was it.
No private messages afterward.
No reason to wonder who he was.
No moment I went back and replayed later that night.
I don’t even remember much about the conversation.
If you had asked me afterward whether I’d met anyone interesting, I’m not sure his name would have occurred to me.
And then life continued.
I hosted. Took photographs. Spent time with friends. Stayed up later than I should have. Went to work the next morning and did it all again.
Ken went wherever Ken went.
I went wherever I went.
For a while, our paths didn’t cross.
There is a temptation, knowing what happened later, to search that first meeting for something.
A look. A feeling. Some tiny sign that should have told me this person would eventually change my life.
There wasn’t one.
I met Ken.
Then I went on with my night.
Nothing important happened.
