Bearing Witness

      Today, I see my youthful fancies reflected in the ruffled old pages of the Neopian Times. In the Gallery of Evil, I confront the very same greyscale sketches that prowled my childhood nightmares. When I click randomly through the old “New Features” pages, I realize, shockingly, that I remember that day, I remember the 18th of March, Y5. I remember coming home from school, upset from an encounter with a playground bully, an older girl who’d laughed at my huge and weighty glasses and made me feel small. I remember logging into Neopets, still sniffling with embarrassment and shame, and seeing that news update, the new Island Techo proudly revealed. The Neopet’s goofy, smiling face brought a little bit of joy to what had been a challenging afternoon. Seeing that news page now, as an adult, brought back a powerful sense of déjà vu, suddenly enveloping me in the sounds and smells and sights of that moment in the past. For a single second, I was seven years old again, sitting at the old clackety family desktop, the setting sun casting long and peaceful shadows around the room and a sweet cinnamon candle crackling merrily on coffee table in the kitchen. I remember, I remember, I remember.

      I found myself in the pound, recently. As a child, I’d always liked the pound. I could be useful at the pound. I could be big, instead of small. Scrolling through the pound now, looking over all the regretfully-named Neopets and a sadly alarming abundance of Flotsams, I suddenly came across a strawberry JubJub – a Neopet I once coveted so long ago, but had always been unable to obtain. I adopted her. Looking at the JubJub’s pet page, I noticed something. Her birthday. The 18th of March, Y5. This Neopet was 18 years old, a “living” piece of internet history.

      18 years ago, the world was a different place. 18 years ago, I was a different person. What’s happened to me since then? My light hair darkened and curled like my mother’s, my bones elongated and grew. My teeth straightened with braces, and then those braces were removed. I learned and learned and learned. I fell in love, I experienced heartbreak. I reconnected with old friends, and lost others. I went to college, then graduate school. I got married. I lived a life. I grew from a child who always felt small to a grown-up who is strong and who lifts others up so that they can feel strong, too.

      And all this time, that Neopet, that little JubJub, was out there. Unbeknownst to me, this Neopet grew up at the same time as I did. This JubJub and I had lived concurrent and yet divergent lives, taking different pathways and yet ending up today in the same exact spot. My feelings of overwhelm at the fast-changing world around me led me back to Neopets, a place that seems unchanging, a place that maintains a faultless record of its own past. But this JubJub never left. I wonder at the history that this Neopet had had. Who created it? Was it a young girl like myself, coming home to play online after a hard day at school? How many times had this Neopet changed hands in the almost two decades of its existence? Has it always been a JubJub? Was its strawberry coat the result of some other child’s years of hard work?

      There’s a tendency, I think, amongst people of a certain age, to discount the online world as somehow “not real.” But this stance ignores the reality that life happens to us wherever we are, and that includes the internet. For the last few decades, many people’s most cherished memories of childhood intertwine within the physical and digital worlds. Their growing-up, too, the acquisition of their morals and values and character, has happened both in-person and online. Courage can look like a lot of different things. It can look like a little girl finally standing up to the playground bully – and getting her glasses snapped in the process. It can also look like that same girl, sitting alone in a darkened room, holding her breath in front of the computer’s glow, mustering up the bravery to enter the Haunted Woods for the first time. Heroism and courage and friendship and love are learned as a person grows. And those old Neopets that exist still today, the relics from 18 years past, witnessed it all.

      I’ll never know for sure who created my Strawberry JubJub, and that’s okay. Soon, I’ll probably leave this place again, off to another great adventure. The truth is, Neopets might not be here if and when I’m ready to return once more. It’s long outlived just about all of the other digital worlds from its day, and there’s no guarantee that it will continue to survive in an online landscape that is radically different from what it ever was before. When I leave Neopets, I can’t do so safe in the assurance that it will always be here for me when I come back. I must instead hold tight onto the courage that this place has given me, venture into those dark and overgrown woods, and face the world at it is – knowing that, whether they forever continue to exist as actual pixels or not, my Neopets will live on in my memory, cheering me along, witnessing my journey, just as they always have.