The next day I logged in and found Tatchi already on my land—moving objects, testing shapes, leaving a trail of small inventions like she’d been there for hours.

I should say: I’d invited her. I asked her to build. But it still startled me. In Second Life, land is private. It’s identity. It’s a kind of home. And there she was—this young woman in Brazil, making something inside my world as if it belonged to her too.

She messaged me like she was afraid I’d yell.

“Hey, I was playing on your land… I hope you don’t mind…,” she typed.

I walked through what she’d made, half smiling, half stunned. It was creative and strange and alive. It didn’t feel like decoration. It felt like presence.

“I love it.,” I wrote.

And before I could stop myself, I wrote the line that gave away more than I meant to.

“I can’t wait to explore my new world…our new world!,” I wrote.

That was the day we worked together—really worked. Not just flirting or sparring in the sandbox. We built things. We played. We read poetry. We fell into that rhythm artists fall into when something clicks: half concentration, half joy, the feeling of making a life out of imagination.

Later I took her to my favorite spiritual gathering, a campfire circle at Anam Turas. It was my attempt to give her something gentle. Something human. A place where nobody had to defend themselves for an hour.

And that’s where I made my mistake.

In the group chat, trying to be playful, trying to make a safe frame around something I already felt was dangerous, I introduced her as my adopted Second Life daughter.

It didn’t go over well.

When we returned home, I was still floating in that happy glow—proud of what she’d built, proud of her, proud of us—until I realized she wasn’t glowing at all.

She was furious.

She wouldn’t accept the father/daughter story. Not for a second. To her it wasn’t cute. It was control. It was me trying to name the relationship so I could manage it.

And suddenly we weren’t two artists building a world.

We were two wounded people fighting over the meaning of closeness.

We circled the argument for a long time until we finally named the truth: she didn’t want to be claimed. She didn’t want to be defined. She wanted freedom even inside intimacy.

And then—late in the night, when the world was quiet, when our words slowed down, when even the avatars seemed to move differently—she accused me of turning her into an experiment.

“I’m thinking you’re doing a experiment with me to write about it and I’m not a rat—not a lab rat.” she typed.

That line hit me hard.

On my website she would’ve seen Rat-Buddha—I built environments and watched what happened inside them.

And here I was again, inviting her onto my land, thrilled by what she made, trying to turn emotion into meaning.

Looking back, what I should have said was: I’m sorry. I don’t want to use you—I want to know you.

So we dropped it. We agreed to let whatever this was become whatever it was going to become.

Part of me was relieved.

Part of me was terrified.

Because the father/daughter frame had been my one thin line of safety—my attempt to put a fence around feelings that were already growing.

Without that fence, everything was open.

And the hours that followed were sweet in a way I didn’t trust. The kind of sweetness that makes you suspicious even while you’re enjoying it. The kind that makes you think: this is too much.

The night softened. We kept building, kept talking, until words became whispers.

That night—we fell asleep together whispering into the ether.