For as long as I can remember, I’ve been into video games; I blame my mother for not giving me a sister with whom to play Barbies and Polly Pocket and dress-up. Instead, I have two older brothers, the younger of which had me sit down on the squishy couch in the den and watch him play "Halo" on his new Xbox.
Thank god for multiplayer; I snatched up the other controller in my excited little hands and he and I were quickly off onto the co-operative adventure together: running down hallways, shooting squeaky little aliens, and screaming loud enough to invoke our mother’s urgent shushing when we came face to face with the freakiest zombie-aliens I’d ever seen.
It was love at first sight.
Three years later, in 2004, when I was the awkward age of 10, I got an incredibly bulky handheld console: the Nintendo DS. It wasn’t sleek in the slightest, but it was silver, and that was pretty cool. Holding it in my pudgy hands, looking down at the reflection of my double-chin in its black top screen, I imagined what great adventures I would have all on my own. This was something special that I didn’t have to share with my brother, who divided his precious time between the Xbox and playing Army Man outside.
He’d later go on to become a Marine. I don’t understand how anyone exercises willingly, but at least it keeps him busy.
I brought that baby everywhere: in the car on long rides to family reunions, to birthday parties, where I’d lie on the couch and become absorbed in the worlds I yearned to keep exploring… I even brought it outside with me for a walk down the road with my friend, Jessica, whose eyes were also glued to the screen of her own DS, one that was probably better than mine in some way because her parents had more money, and that meant everything she owned was slightly better than anybody else’s.
The sun was out that day; we could barely see our screens, but we were so in love with our consoles that we’d go through any struggle to play them for any amount of time. I had a bad habit of shuffling my feet. Little pebbles skittered across the road in my path, wishing they were bouncing off of waves in the ocean instead of asphalt and dirt on a suburban street.
One of those pebbles must’ve been out to get me, or maybe I shuffled right into a pothole, or maybe my hands just stopped working, but before I could understand what was happening, my DS fell out of my grip and made direct contact with the hard, unforgiving asphalt below.
I gasped, Jessica gasped, the silent street around us might’ve gasped, too.
“Did you break it?” she asked, holding hers close to her chest, probably afraid that whatever bad juju was around might come after her, too.
I bent down to pick up my most treasured belonging; the hinges that attach the top to the bottom were cracked.
Looked pretty broken to me.
