It’s Just a Box

The sizzling sound on the pan meant breakfast was coming. It was time for scrambled eggs, but I didn’t know that something would scramble my brains that day as well.

I plopped myself down in a warm, fuzzy couch. My gaming couch was an impenetrable fortress that no one could scale to stop me from playing.

I stared at the black box in front of me. It was time to turn it on. Then a thousand different characters would leap out and introduce me to their worlds.

It was time to play some video games.

The game box served up fun, food and wine. Tick, tock the clock hands swerved. My next glance at the clock was at four o’clock.

Was there any need to see friends now? The box had all the social media you could want. You could share anything.

I found out, though, that sharing everything was not a great idea. I didn’t want to share my pathetic drunken game session. Well, maybe not this time.

All this social stuff clouded my interest in fun games. It would be nice, I thought, to have these social options, but I don’t want them plastered over everything.

Sometimes I just want to play alone to relax. Is that really so strange?

I decided on a change of scenery. When I stepped outside, the sun lit up my ghostly pale, pasty face, and I had to fight to open my light atrophied eyes.

I knew something was wrong when I tried to adjust the brightness outside. The rock in front of me should have been barely visible.

I swiped at the air to bring up an options menu. I could always adjust brightness with motion controls on the box. Alas, it didn’t work! My eyes still felt the searing pain of the sun.

Maybe I just needed to play a different game. My finger extended as if I could open the disc tray, but nothing happened. I stood there with a quizzical expression on my face. My mouth shifted to the left so that it almost formed a question mark shape, and my chin looked like the dot.

That’s when I saw a huge open field in front of me. The shiny sun, which illuminated every single blade of grass, punctuated the bright blue sky. People ran around, jumped up and down, sang and laughed. I had almost forgotten this stuff.

You know, the box had changed: it offered more options, noise and made mundane tasks exciting. It was shiny, sleek, sexy and seemed to have everything just for me.

But it was still only a box, and it was only one of many in life.