"To be fair, this is about three-quarters of the way to way to one of my fantasies."
Krista and I are half dressed, in my bed, waiting for the air conditioner to catch up with the weather, and she's watching me play The Walking Dead. We've been here for about an hour and made it most of the way through the first episode. This wasn't the plan for the day, but when I got to the airport an hour and a half earlier, Krista got into car and found me crying. She got me back to my apartment, and immediately started asking if I wanted a cup of tea, to talk, a hug, to go for a run. I haven't slept in three or four days and am feeling a bit like a zombie myself.
"Honestly?"
"Yeah, Kels. Honestly. What do you want?"
"I want to kill some zombies."
"Then let's kill some zombies."
So we're snuggled up in my bed killing zombies. After I drop a particularly vehement string of cuss words (fucking Kenny) she leans in and kisses me on the shoulder.
"I love you, Kels."
"Now we're nearly all of the way into one of my fantasies." I reply, distractedly, before I frantically start smashing buttons. "Oh, shit!"
"Careful, honey, that guy's about to eat your face off."
"Nope." I say, after a particularly gruesome scene involving a hammer and a zombie skull. "Got 'em."
I forgot how therapeutic video games can be.
"Bad" does not even begin to describe the past few weeks. They've been a potent, emotional catastrafuck cocktail of stress, long days, bad decisions, and failures to communicate. I'm so worried about my coming race that running is only adding to the frustration that I feel (I cried, twice, after runs this week), my attention span is so short that the books I'm reading can't hold my attention, and I have zero emotional energy left over at the end of the day to invest in television. So I've been knocking around the house. I honestly couldn't tell you what I've been doing, sitting and staring at a page or the wall, probably.
Until I started listening to the Love and Wario podcast.
You know that feeling when you meet someone and instantly think ohmygodweshouldtotallybefriendsbecauseyou'resocool! If you're an adult with a functioning self-control system, you won't immediately blurt that sentence out, but will go about being friendly and kind and outgoing and the other things adults do to make new friends.
Spoiler alert: I don't have a functioning self-control system.
After binge-listening to the podcasts I immediately messaged one of the hosts and, well, let's just say there were a lot of capital letters and exclamation points.
(I also maybe said that being a special guest on the podcast was my new life's goal.)
I can be cringe-inducingly fangirlish sometimes.
So it's sort of a bad news/good news thing. The bad news, of course, is that I might have did come off as a total fucking nutjob. The good news is that I ended up with a long list of games that would run on my ancient laptop as well as a couple that I could play on my phone.
I forgot how much I love video games.
I met my first boyfriend at a LAN party. My younger brother and I used to spend hours in the basement testing Age of Empires strategies. I don't think I slept the week after we got Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (the nostalgia I feel for the game is incredible). I once nearly gave my brother a black eye after a particularly tense afternoon of playing first-person shooters. When Diablo II rolled out I created a special character (melee, I typically play ranged) specifically so I could go hack apart demons after stressful days.
I stopped gaming kind of abruptly when I started dating someone who preferred we spend our time reading Great Books and listening to Bartok (that guy was the fucking worst). He made me feel really guilty about the amount of time I was spending playing games. After we broke up, the guilt remained and I switched to the occasional tabletop game because I could be social and feel less guilty about the time I was spending on games.
I was pretty fucking dumb.
Don't get me wrong, the eight-twelve hours a day I used to spend on Diablo was probably a little much (between the game and my social anxiety, I was like a proto-Codex). But going cold-turkey, especially for an pretentious asshat who didn't understand why I might enjoy playing video games (nerd boys for life now) was colossally stupid. Equally stupid was never picking them back up because of some kind of misdirected guilt about what I should be doing with my time.
The truth, I realize as I choose to save Carly instead of Doug during a particularly tense moment in The Walking Dead, is that video games are as therapeutic and soothing for me as a long run. A good one can take me out of my own head and immerse me in a storyline as easily and completely as a good book. And when Krista reaches over and rubs my back I'm reminded they can be just as social as any of my other hobbies.
Thanks, Love and Wario.
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