I found myself thinking about the bench again today.
Not a real bench, of course. Capsuleers don’t spend much time on planets. But in my mind, it always existed somewhere beneath a Gallente sky, overlooking distant city lights. A place where two people could always meet, no matter how complicated life became.
At least, that was the promise.
The trouble with promises is that they only work when both people mean them.
For a long time, I believed there would always be a seat waiting for me there. That no matter how many jumps separated us, no matter how many years passed, we’d eventually find our way back to that spot and talk about life for a while.
I know better now.
The promise wasn’t broken all at once. It died slowly. By the time I understood what had happened, the bench was already gone.
Blown apart.
By being treated like an option instead of a person.
I sat cloaked in my Helios beside a forgotten wormhole for a while, watching stars drift across the canopy. In EVE, when a structure is destroyed, all that’s left is a wreck and a killmail. Clean. Simple.
Real life isn’t nearly so tidy.
Eventually, I sighed and closed the old memories like an abandoned bookmark folder.
I aligned toward home, engaged warp, and began the familiar journey back to my Wormlife freeport. The stars stretched into lines, the wormhole chain waited ahead, and for the first time in a long while, I stopped looking for a seat that no longer existed.
