A TikTok user has shared a story about online friendship that makes us want to bawl our eyes out.
In a stitch with @sellycisco, who shared his own experience of losing an online friendship, @tattletav (Tavi) shared her story of her online friend Kathleen.
In the video, she says that in 2006 she got Animal Crossing: Wild World for her DS and she wanted to make friends with fellow players and so she joined a forum called “Animal Crossing Community” and posted that she was available.
“Two people who happen to be friends comment on my post and they say, ‘we’re free to come over’ so we exchange friend codes,” she explains, “I had just grown a couple of hybrids that I was excited to show off. I had arranged the town in a way that I loved and I was just so excited.”
“They come over and they trash my town. They chop down trees, they dog up my hybrids, they kick up the custom paths that I laid down. The town was a mess, and I was devastated, truly”
She says that this was when she met her new online friend Kathleen.
She went back to the community to warn them of the online trolls’ antics and is approached by someone who offers to help her.
“The first person to comment was Kathleen, and she says, ‘have you cleaned up yet?’ And I was like ‘no I haven’t,’ and she was like ‘I’ll come and help you’. And despite the really shitty experience that I’d just had, something in my heart and my gut said, ‘You can trust her’.”
She says that, along with Kathleen, all of Kathleen’s friends came to her island to help clean up the mess and helped her rebuild her island, leaving her with more than she had originally. They gave her gold tools which she hadn’t had, brought her more hybrids, and put her trees back “even nicer” than they had been.
This is where you might need your tissues folks. “Kathleen and I would go on to play [together] every single day for well over a year. Fast forward to August 2007, about my first day of college. I open my gates and she doesn’t come.”
She goes on to say that she waited for eight days, leaving her gates open, going to see if Kathleen had opened hers, and had her DS on its loudest volume in case Kathleen showed up. She says that she was worried.
But then she did show up. “On the eighth day she comes, except it’s not her, it’s her daughter coming to tell me that her mom had passed away.”
Tearily, Tavi continued saying, “She said that her mom had given her step-by-step instructions—because she didn’t play video games—on how to come and visit me in Animal Crossing to let me know what happened.”
She finished the video by saying, “I play video games a lot and there is not a single time that I play online that I do not think about Kathleen.”
The caption just broke our hearts even more. Tavi wrote, “I was 16 when I started playing with Kathleen, I’m 33 now, and the mark that she’s left on my heart is even greater than I’m sure she ever imagined. Video games can and do change lives.”
(featured image: Nintendo)
