My First Time

"Oh, dear, I'm no interpreter of maladies. Yes, Jhumpa Lahiri is in fact a family friend; though I'm not particularly fond of her writing."

File under statements rarely made in Second Life, or Analog Life for that matter.

As an Indian girl in Second Life I bridge several peculiar minorities; those of time zone, linguistics, education, sexual orientation and profession, as well as translator of social mores. It is a peculiar niche to carve, yet one which I have inhabited in the Analog my whole life, and which provides both comfort and conundrum with expected regularity.

I was told about Second Life by my former girlfriend, and one day innocently downloaded the viewer at my office to investigate this world which I had no previous notion of. Quite unhappy with the clay figure I saw, I spent my first hours learning how to adjust my appearance and skin tone to more closely resemble my self, my conception of my "self". I found the nose to be the most difficult; I am both cursed and blessed with a traditionally ethnic proboscis of decidedly Persian origin...read "large and rather unwieldy". After attaining some small comfort with my new character, I wandered away from the newbie island in search of this human interaction that my previous paramour assured me was to be found. Little did I know.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I was to find. As a woman in avatar and fact I was propositioned with varying degrees of propriety (or lack thereof) before I had even escaped the confines of the welcome center. My initial reaction was of self-defense: what kind of world was this, where I am yet another product to be consumed by the masses? And where did she get that wonderful outfit, while I am here in a hideously concocted ensemble of pink and blue? After some less predatory conversations, I discovered shopping.

My learning curve has always been rather shallowly inclined; I take to new information intuitively and synthetically. Thus I was found by my first in-world paramour (though I didn't know it then) at an asian-themed store scouting for freebies. K.A. approached me with refreshing tact: "Hello Shrutiyan; I see that you're new here...would you like a little help looking around?" She was beautiful, clad in a provocatively skin-tight red outfit, and continued to speak in a way that indicated both sensitivity and intelligence, always the surest way to infiltrate my defenses. We shopped and talked for hours, her instructing me on the basics of interaction in this place (I hadn't yet discovered how to read a profile), of the many things this world had to offer in the way of creation, communion, and of course consumption. All the while K.A. had been complimenting me; my beauty, my uniqueness in a world of amazonian white women (I'm on the shorter side of a darker ethnicity), and my charming naivete. After outfitting me in an acceptable frog-collared asian silk shirt and some low-rise black pants, both far exceeding my Analog attire sexiness by several magnitudes yet emphatically tame for this world, she took me home to her "apartment in the sky" (I did not yet understand skyboxes, or even the beginning of the newly expanded physical boundaries here). She had hinted several times about the (dare I say it?) rampant sexuality that pervaded the aether in SL; I related how I had already fended off several hackneyed advances from equally inexperienced avatars. Soon we began to confide in each other, something I would later learn to do with much greater discretion: who our Analog selves were, the persons behind the masks. Our flirtation became more concrete, tangible....

K.A.: "Click on the pink ball. It will ask you to animate your avatar; click 'Yes'." In retrospect, Dante Alighieri invariably associates with this moment: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Here I was, making love to a woman in texted chat, sitting at my computer in an office in Mumbai, seeing my cartoon representation glide through a series of positions I was in turn familiar with and pleasantly surprised at, feeling things I had yearned for without recompense for far too long. How I wish I had known how to save that chat, but like the Analog, that moment is enshrined in the gossamer film of memory alone. And it was the moment my life had changed. No longer was I ensconced in a world of convention and limitation that did not agree with my own attunement, no longer subject to my terms being predicated by Theirs; I was in a place that I could inhabit entirely as an embodiment of my desires, my Id and Ego given form and free reign. K.A. was herself as shocked as I at my aptitude. "A girl of your talents could make a lot of money in this place. Many girls do it, but it's not for everyone. Go out and explore, learn, and find what you love. And always remember me." She then gave me my first money in Second Life; for the first time I felt what I like to call the "Romance of the Transaction". How could I forget?

Since that first meeting I stumbled, then ran, along the path of escorting, discovering the mechanics and the semantics, and discovering a part of myself only dreamed of vicariously until now. I learned to excel, and find my place in it. And I only look back in fond remembrance.