Lately I've been, well... distracted.

It's... well, you see, there's this game. She, well, she's not from around here, you know? Only knows a few words of English, and even those are spoken with a heavy accent. I met her at work. Part of a longer assignment, really. The boss figured that since I knew a little of her native tongue that I was the guy to work with her. Get her oriented, you know? Establish some common grounds and open up the communication. Normally I'm good about not mixing my business and personal life. "Don't dip your pen in the company ink," right?

Yeah. Well, anyway...

It's not that she's particularly beautiful. Still, there's something about her that makes her beautiful in a way that World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 could never be. Maybe you'd call it "quirky." Or "cute." Cute like a pile of kittens is cute. No, not like Puzzle Pirates. I don't know, maybe it's something about how her eyes render, or her musical score (which, I note, is pleasantly ample for her type of game) or her shader. She has a 'toon shader, which is the sort of thing that some guys will tell you just makes a game ugly, just like that. I've never felt that way, although if pressed I'd have to admit I couldn't tell you why.

If you explain why a game is beautiful, it sounds like you have a fetish. Strange, isn't it?

So we start playing, and, well who am I kidding. I can hardly understand a word she says, but I'm willing to work with her. Next thing I know I'm getting killed by a giant plush bunny with a bloody meat cleaver. Yeah, I know. She calls it her "Slaughter Rabbit." Back in high school I would probably have swum the breadth of the Pacific Ocean just to be with a game that could give me a good "Slaughter Rabbit." Eventually, with a little patience from both of us, I get us pointed in the right direction and go out and fight little Peeps.

Right, like those marshmallow things. And they explode with items and xp like pinatas. It's like she can read my mind. It's like shared destiny.

Which, of course, is why it's going to crush my heart to leave her.

My free time is almost up, and I can't pay to continue. The distance is too much for her developers (they're rather controlling, but then, aren't all developers just so?). I had to take care when I first asked her out for a free trial. Her developers didn't really want to see her with a foreigner like me, but I had just enough command of her language to fool them. Even once we started going together she told me about all these crazy limitations. It wasn't that she didn't want to, she explained, it was her developers. They wouldn't let her go all the way with me unless I committed to her first. It wasn't that I was unwilling, just that, like I said, the distance was too great for her developers to ever see me as legitimate.

But, maybe it's just as well.

In my imagination, I can trace the lines of our relationship just as surely as if I was a palm reader: we'd be as star cross'd as any couple ever was. Eventually I would've gotten tired of punching marshmallows and getting murdered by bunnies. That's just the way I've always been ever since I started noticing games. I'd have realized that she really is just Diablo II with an accent and a kimono. Maybe I would have even told her that to her face. We'd get in this huge argument because I'd say that she's so needy because she's asking for so much of my time and money, and then she'd say that she's getting all kinds of attention from other boys, even other girls, and she sure as hell doesn't need me. Then I'd get really mad and call her a Diablo clone. Then she'd start crying, and I'd get a sinking feeling in my stomach and say I was sorry, and that I really loved who I was when I was with her, and that I still wanted to stay with her (which was true, if only sometimes), and that we had made a lot of beautiful memories together. Then we'd have some quick make-up fun and quietly try to convince ourselves that we were still enjoying it. But deep down we'd both know that it was too late. Neither one of us would be truly happy with the other one. Inevitably: we'd drift apart.

Mono no aware she calls it. "Moe-no know ah-wah-ray," I hear the sounds roll around my mouth as I echo her: to see the beauty of transitory things. Like cherry blossoms, she says. Like cherry blossoms.

And so for now, she is beautiful.