the best kind of birth control

i told my therapist about the tiefling warlock who made a pact with a sentient bag of holding. not for power. not for revenge. because she was lonely and the bag talked back and she figured, well, at least it wont leave me for someone with better cantrips. my therapist blinked. then she wrote something down.^*1 i dont know what she wrote. i think about that sometimes. the notebook is leather bound and she always uses the same pen, a black pilot gel, and i wonder if she has a separate section just for me or if im mixed in with everyone else, the anxious ones, the depressed ones, the ones who cant stop thinking about their exes. i like to imagine im in a category of my own. the dnd one. the one who talks about elves with the same seriousness other people talk about their childhood trauma.

this is what happens when you spend twenty-two years building characters in a game about elves and dice. you start to realize the characters are building you back. its not a metaphor. its not some cute little thing i say to sound deep. i mean it literally. there is a version of me that exists only in the margins of character sheets, in the backstories i wrote at 3 am when i couldnt sleep, in the voices i put on during sessions. that version is more real than the one sitting in the therapists office. that version has killed gods. that version has died a hundred times and come back a hundred and one. that version understands something the therapist version doesnt, which is that there is no such thing as a clean narrative. there is no arc. there is just a series of moments, some of them beautiful, most of them confusing, and you string them together however you can.

lets talk about the spectrum. it is not a ladder. it is not a hierarchy. it is a tangled mess of yarn and every time you pull on one thread, five others come loose and you have to decide whether to cut them or weave them back in.

there was kaelen, the half-elf rogue who could not stop stealing things. not because he was greedy. because he was convinced the universe was a zero-sum game and if he did not take something first, someone else would take it from him. he was wrong. he knew he was wrong. he kept doing it anyway. <Mark>he died in a dungeon because he tried to pickpocket a lich and the lich thought it was hilarious.</Mark> it was not hilarious. the lich was an asshole. but heres the thing about kaelen: he wasnt just a thief. he was also a poet. he wrote terrible poetry in his downtime, all about the moon and lost love and the way candlelight flickers before it dies. he never showed anyone the poetry. i found it in his inventory one day, tucked between the thieves tools and the bag of caltrops. i had written it. i had forgotten i wrote it. that was the first time i realized my characters were not separate from me. they were just me wearing different masks.

there was morwen, the dwarven cleric who worshipped a god of stagnation. she didnt heal wounds. she preserved them. she kept enemies alive in a state of perpetual agony because she believed death was too merciful. i built her when i was twenty and thought i understood something about morality. i didnt. i understood that i was angry at my father. i processed that anger through a character who would never exist outside of a thursday night game. the other players hated her. they said she was cruel. they said she made them uncomfortable. i loved her. i still love her. she was right about some things. not the torture. the torture was fucked up. but the idea that healing is not always kind, that sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is let something rot so something new can grow, that was real. that was something i needed to hear. i just couldnt hear it unless it came from a dwarf with a warhammer and a grudge against the gods.

and then there was vesper.

god.

vesper was a human fighter who was pathologically afraid of failure. not afraid of death. afraid of losing. he would reroll his stats. he would recalculate his bonuses. he would spend forty-five minutes deciding whether to open a door because what if the door was trapped and what if he failed the save and what if the party looked at him with disappointment in their eyes. he was exhausting. he was me at twenty-four. i didnt know that then. i know it now. i know it because i still do the same thing. i still rewrite emails seventeen times before sending them. i still rehearse conversations in the shower. i still lie awake at night thinking about that one time i said something awkward at a party and no one cared but i could not let it go. vesper was that part of me. the part that cannot stop calculating. the part that believes if i just prepare enough, if i just think of every possible outcome, i will never be caught off guard. but you cant prepare for everything. you cant calculate for the thing you didnt see coming. vesper learned that the hard way. he died saving a village from a dragon. he was terrified the whole time. he did it anyway. i cried when he died. my players thought i was crying for the village. i was crying for vesper. i was crying for the part of me that was brave enough to open the door.^*2

my therapist says i use characters as emotional proxies. she says i build these elaborate cages of backstory and alignment charts so i dont have to look directly at the thing i am avoiding. she says its clever. she says its also a little sad. she is not wrong. but she is also not entirely right. because the cages are not just cages. they are also homes. they are places where the messy parts of me can live without apology. they are places where i can be the villain, the hero, the coward, the saint, all at once. they are places where i do not have to choose.

the world i built, the one that lives in my head, the one that bleeds into my notebooks and my google docs and the margins of my library books, is a mess. it is a glorious, tangled, impossible mess. there are gods who have forgotten their own names. there are cities built on the bones of older cities built on the bones of older cities. there are histories that contradict each other and i refuse to reconcile them because contradiction is the point. there is a kingdom where the currency is memories. <Mark>there is a forest where the trees scream when you cut them down.</Mark> there is a tavern that exists in three different dimensions at once and the barmaid is a retired archfey who just wants to be left alone. there is a library that stretches into infinity and the books are alive and they bite if you try to read them without asking first. there is a mountain that is actually a sleeping god and no one knows what happens if it wakes up but everyone has a theory and the theories are all wrong.

you want to know what the best kind of birth control is?

it is the vulnerability. the shared vulnerability. it is knowing that someone is going to judge your character choices and you are going to judge theirs and none of it matters because you are all in it together, rolling dice and making mistakes and laughing when the nat 1 destroys your carefully laid plans.

it is the creation. the endless, obsessive, borderline-deranged creation. it is building a thousand characters and watching a thousand versions of yourself die in a thousand different ways, and somehow coming out the other side more whole than you were before. it is the love. the quiet, unspoken love. the kind you do not talk about because talking about it would ruin it. the kind that lives in the spaces between sessions, in the group chats at 2 am, in the shared google drive folder with seventeen different documents and no naming scheme. but here is the thing i keep coming back to.

i think about the partner i do not have. i think about the person who is supposed to look at my chaos and not flinch. i think about the person who is supposed to understand that the line between playing pretend and being alive is thinner than most people think. i do not have that person. not yet. maybe not ever. and that is fine. that is okay. i have built entire worlds by myself. i have built cities and kingdoms and pantheons and not a single other person has seen any of it.

i imagine thirty-six hours straight. not thirty-six hours over a week. thirty-six hours in one stretch. no sleep. no breaks. just dice and maps and voices and the slow unraveling of a city we built together out of nothing. i imagine starting with a blank sheet of paper and by hour six we have a river. by hour twelve we have a market district and a temple and a graveyard where the dead occasionally get up and walk around because the soil is cursed. by hour eighteen we have a political system involving three rival families and a guild of assassins who only work during eclipses. by hour twenty-four we have a thousand years of history, wars and treaties and betrayals and one very confused bard who accidentally became king and then immediately abdicated because he just wanted to play his lute. by hour thirty we have a pantheon of gods who are all secretly the same god wearing different hats and that god is a cat and the cat is asleep and that is why the world is the way it is. by hour thirty-six we have a city so real we can smell it. we can taste the bread from the bakeries and hear the arguments in the council chambers and feel the weight of the cobblestones under our feet.

i imagine forgetting we were supposed to have sex. forgetting completely. not a conscious decision. not some grand romantic gesture. just looking up from the table, both of us covered in notes and empty coffee cups and the debris of thirty-six hours of creation, and realizing we have not thought about it once. not once. too busy building a world. too busy being gods. and that is when i know. that is when i understand what the rest of our lives would look like. we would be the people with dual incomes and no kids. not because we hate children. children are fine. children are lovely. but we have something else. we have kingdoms that need ruling. we have a thousand characters who are waiting to be born and a thousand more who are waiting to die and all of them need our attention. all of them need us to show up and roll the dice and see what happens. we would have jelly cats. a lot of jelly cats. i dont like animals. i dont like the way they smell or the way they shed or the way they look at you like they know something you dont. but jelly cats are different. jelly cats are soft and silent and they do not judge me for spending six hours on a single backstory. they sit on the shelves and watch us play and they are perfect.^*3 we would have a kingdom too. a small one. a kingdom that exists only in our heads and on our character sheets and in the stories we tell each other when we cannot sleep. the kingdom would have no name because we cannot agree on one and we argue about it for years and i think that is beautiful. i think that is what love looks like. two people who cannot agree on a name for their imaginary kingdom but who will defend that kingdom to the death anyway.

i imagine being the princess. not because i am royal or important or special. because i like the way it sounds. because i like the way he says it. my princess, he says, and then he giggles and i giggle and we are both ridiculous and we both know it. he would be the soldier i assigned to protect me. he would be my protector for seven years, for ten years, for the rest of our lives. not in a real way. in a way that matters more than real. he would protect me from the silences. he would protect me from the moments when my brain gets too loud and i cannot find the off switch. he would protect me from the fear that i am too much, that i am too weird, that i will never be the kind of person who can just sit still and be normal. he would protect me by being weirder. he would protect me by being a soldier in my imaginary army and by taking the job seriously even though we both know it is a game. we would stay up all night sometimes. not doing anything. just talking. just building. just being two people who found each other in the chaos and decided that chaos was the point. we would giggle until we cannot breathe. we would go crazy together. we would lose track of time and space and the fact that we have work in the morning and we do not care. we do not care because this is the thing that matters. this is the thing that makes life worth living.

i told my therapist about vesper again last week. i told her i finally killed him off. i told her he died saving a village from a dragon. i told her he was terrified the whole time and he did it anyway. she said, that sounds like growth. i said, it is just a game. she said, is it? i did not answer. i do not have to. she already knows.

so here is my thesis. here is the thing i am circling, the thing i keep almost saying and then pulling back from. we build worlds because this one is insufficient. we build characters because we are insufficient. we reach across the table and we roll the dice and we hope, desperately, that the story will be enough. that we will be enough. it is. we are.

the best kind of birth control is the one that lets you be a little bit unhinged. the one that takes the chaos in your head and gives it form. the one that says, yes, you can be a tiefling warlock who made a pact with a sentient bag, and yes, that bag will love you more than any person ever could. the one that says, yes, you can spend thirty-six hours building a city with your partner and forget about everything else because the city is alive and it needs you. the one that says, yes, you can be the princess even if there is no soldier. yes, you can be the king even if there is no kingdom. yes, you can be the god even if there is no one to worship you. the one that says, yes, you can giggle all night and go crazy and that is not a flaw, that is the whole point, even if you are giggling alone.

it is the game. it has always been the game.

vesper is dead. kaelen is dead. morwen is probably still out there, preserving something she should not, and i hope she is happy. i am building a new character. she is a wizard who specializes in divination. she is terrified of the future. she sees it all the time, every possibility, every branching path, every way the dice could fall, and she is paralyzed by the weight of it. she is me. she has always been me. but this time, i think she is going to be okay. i think she is going to open the door. i think she is going to fail and survive it. i think she is going to learn what vesper learned, what kaelen never learned, what morwen knew all along but could never say out loud. which is that the only thing worse than losing is never trying. the only thing worse than failure is the fear of it. the only thing worse than a messy, tangled, impossible world is no world at all.

the point is the dice rolling across the table and the sound they make when they hit the wood. the point is the story. the point is always the story.^*4