Around a year ago, I was the most sleep deprived I had ever been in my life. I had decided to cap off my summer by dedicating a week of my life solely to the mobile game (and community) that has dominated my free time for the past three-odd years. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty details, but I gamed for about eighteen hours a day for a straight week, sleeping on average about three hours a night.

It was a blast.

I had been building up to this week for about a year—saving resources, getting to know people, helping them out on their own gaming goals, and generally getting to know the game inside and out, forwards and backwards. I expected to have a good amount of support, but I’m not sure I expected to have so much fun. I’ve had times that were all high stress and emotional exhaustion, but when it was my time to shine, it was like a greatest hits of my past two years. I saw so many familiar names, hung out with my friends in voice call for hours, and pushed past my limits. Sure, I had some awkward conversations at work about what I did with my vacation—doesn’t sound great to say “I moved my desk into my room and sat there for eight days”—but I don’t regret it. I achieved my goal, people moved on to the next discord server, and I moved on, back to real life.

It’s expected, in the way of community unwritten rules, that you write a thank you letter. Some people are super on top of their thank yous and get it turned around within a week; some people have been promising to write theirs for the last year. And I was determined to be in the first category. I’m a writer, after all, and I was not going to be mercilessly teased by my friends for dragging my feet.

As someone who did her senior honors project on genre, the Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! thank you letter is infinitely interesting to me academically. These letters usually have some sort of preamble (with a self-conscious link to the later thank you section) describing how they got into the game/the community, why the person chose to set their goal on a particular event, their preparation, etc. Then the person lists out the names of all the people who helped them with varying levels of detail: some are likely a list, some give written thank yous to important/notable people, and other strive to write something personalized for the fifty to one hundred and fifty people who helped. Much like recipe blogs, the preamble seems unrelated to the actual state intent of the document; unlike recipe blogs, they are my favorite part of the whole thing.

Like a good writer, I prepared. I made a spreadsheet of every person who contributed, how much they helped, where I knew them from, and any special points I wanted to make for them; I brainstormed an outline of how to package my two years of history with the game—an Eras Tour comparison that in hindsight I am glad I never fleshed out. I prepared, but I did not write.

Despite my best efforts, and thirteen pages in Google docs to show for it, I have not published my thank you letter. With all the other demands of the year and the fact that it’s not technically something I have to do, I let it slide. And now, a year later, it’s still sitting in my periphery, weighing on my conscience.

I love these thank you letters because they are time capsules: what a person was feeling about an event, the inside jokes, what they are looking forward to next in the game. At this point, I don’t remember much of my week that I am intending to thank people for without immersing myself in the written history (which thankfully I have control over, so unless Discord shuts down I’m in the clear). At this point, it feels like I’m writing thank you notes out of obligation, like I had the equivalent of an internet wedding and instead of noting gifts given, I’m thanking them for playing a game with me for four hours.

I hadn’t thought about my letter in a while; it’s been a particularly hectic spring for me. A part of me wants to scrap it; a part of me wants to clean it up and just post what I have and call it good. Mostly, I’m just disappointed in myself. I want a written, digested version of the person I was last year, the person fresh off the wave of the support of one hundred and fifty eight people, and try as I might, I missed that boat.

Rationally, I know that gratitude doesn’t have an expiration date. There are people in the community who have posted their thank you letter months and months later; I’m still excited when I get a thank-you note in the mail from a wedding. I may have missed my chance to get an unvarnished thank you letter—relationships have changed, people have left the game, and countless others have come in. Still, I want to finish it: for them, for me, to complete the circle, to finally have my mark written down.

It may take me another year.

As “research” (read: procrastination), I went looking for some of these thank you letters. I’m afraid they will mean very little to people outside this niche community, but I wanted to link them regardless in case you are curious: a dream top 1 thank you letter, a five-month-late top 2 letter, a top 1 letter from a seasoned veteran who had tragedy strike, a whimsy Christmas-themed top 1 letter, a heartful top 3 letter, and a bit of a tongue-in-cheek top 1 letter from that same veteran.

Alex Johnson

Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.