Those that we lost.

[Abriael]

A word of warning: If you don't want to read another post about the events that befell Japan in the last few days, just don't read.

The last few days have been rather bewildering to me. It's easy to ignore a catastrophe when it happens thousands of miles away from you, and it doesn't involve people that you know or have personal contacts with.

Being a volunteer I have seen several natural disasters in my life, the last one was the Earthquake in l'Aquila (luckily, while definitely bad, not nearly as disasterous as the one in northern Japan), but none of them directly involved friends and people that I knew, so I wasn't really prepared for this one.
They were still painful experiences, mind you. Very painful. But it felt somehow different.

I've spent the last few days in which the servers of FFXIV were up periodically checking my friend list, hoping that my Japanese friends would show up. Some did, some, unfortunately, didn't.

Of course I don't know if any of them was actually involved in the disaster (while every Japanese is somehow involved), the lack of news is disheartening.

This gave me a realization, one that, I'm not afraid to admit it, made me cry. The laws of numbers dictate that at least some FFXIV/XI players probably have been directly by the heartquake. Some of them we may have lost.

I don't know how many, and none of us will ever know, but it pains me that there are Lalafells, Mi'quote Roegadyn, Hyur and Elzen that will never appear again in Eorzea, not because they are disgruntled by some of the flaws of the game (and this all honestly makes me feel heavily how pointless those are), but because the human being behind them is no more.

I wish I knew their names, their faces, in order to be able to remember them as more than an online avatar with a fantasy name.

I can't help feeling a dull pain about it, and I hope that happier times will come soon for Japan and for all of us that care.
I hope, then, we'll meet again in Eorzea, put our silly differences about jumping, PvP, quests, classes and all that crap aside, and spend a moment to remember those we lost.