When World of Warcraft Is an Escape from wisepowder's blog

MY COUSIN KANO emerges from the oasis water as something aquatic, fins where his feet used to be, tusks sprouted from his mouth, gliding. This is something he learned today, spent all day walking the endless plains of the Barrens, killing this and collecting that (with me healing him along the way) to finally complete his quest: A seer teaches him Aquatic Form, he surges with gold light and reaches level 17. This oasis is where he wanted to cast this spell for the first time. I sit at the edge of this shining pool, surrounded by palm trees and red centaurs in an expanse of cracked earth, and I watch him with awe. Through Ventrilo, the ancestor of Discord that compelled Kano and me to compel our mothers to buy spongy microphones from Best Buy, I hear his pride. Watch me, as he moves through the water, transformed. Look what I can do.To get more news about WoW Gold TBC, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

We were growing and learning what we could with these bodies. Eleven and 12 years old, with the chemical murmur of adolescence around the bend, our worlds were a string of question marks and exclamation points, from the acne on our faces to new dreams of becoming a doctor (him) and a writer (me). At this tail end of true childhood— before girlfriends and college, before quarantine, before the fires turned California into an orange world where the sky bled like a sunset all day— Kano and I spent thousands of hours together, living and dying in World of Warcraft.

Four years ago, Kano died from brain cancer. We drifted apart many years before, around 2009, when I began to show signs of addiction and my parents uninstalled the game from my computer. We lived a hundred miles away, him in California’s Inland Empire and me in Orange County. So Azeroth, the central planet of WoW, was our tether. Twelve years severed and Kano now gone, I wanted to come back and somehow find a way closer to him and the time we spent together. I wanted something worlds away.
Quarantine, so far, had brought horror into the mundane corners of my life: This March, while making breakfast, I accidentally cleaved my finger with a bread knife. I had to perform a home surgery with super glue, chopsticks, and my girlfriend’s hair tie as a tourniquet—all to keep my asthmatic body away from the hospitals then brimming with Covid cases. When I was capable of putting both hands back on a keyboard, the first thing I wanted to do was trade this surreal planet for another.

I reinstalled WoW in May. To recover my old account, for which I’d long forgotten my username and password, I had to email Blizzard, the game’s developer, with fragments of information that still lingered with me: I had a male Blood Elf named Otaru (an anagram of Naruto with the ‘n’ thrown out) and then renamed Mizukage (named after the leader of the Hidden Water Village in Naruto, height of my geekdom) who was maybe level 80. I could not remember my server or my guild. I sent the email without a hope of a reply, but Blizzard said they found my old account. The names of my original characters had been wiped—retired and surrendered to new players—but those characters still lived. Blizzard logged me in and, seeing those characters as I left them over a decade ago, in the same armor I had grinded so many nights to get, I could feel the tether again, the distance closing.