By S.K. Bacon
“The Ender Dragon isn’t the final boss. It’s growing up.”
The little rush of excitement you got from your friend picking up your call, or from seeing their username and “joined the game” in the corner of your screen. The smile that crept across your face when you heard the nostalgic in-game music.
The sound effects of walking. Of eating. Of placing items and blocks. Of different animals and monsters. The things you associated with those sounds.
You associated them with home. With happiness. With hours with your friends, laughing and making memories. With content creators who made it feel so cool just to be playing the same game as them.
It wasn’t just a game at that point. It was home.
The hours spent slaving over it. The different consoles and devices it has been downloaded or purchased on. The clickity-clack of a keyboard or the pressing of controller buttons. The “yes!”s and “oh, come on, man!”s that can make you laugh or cry. The millions of “nah, I’ll do it later”s and “oh, c’mon, just for a little while”s that turned into more than a little while. That turned into hours of escape.
The memories you made in that little world of yours. Your first house. The first time you find diamonds and get almost giddy with joy. How you smile and scream and giggle with excitement when you see your friend in-game for the first time. When you befriend a dog and turn its collar a different color.
Those are the memories that made the game home. Some might say that wherever there’s a crafting table, a furnace, and a chest, that’s a home. But that’s not even a home. Even in the real world, that’s not home. Home is with whom or where you feel safe. Home is where you can be yourself comfortably, without having or wanting to worry about judgment or hate or hurt. Home doesn’t even have to be a place. It can be the person you trust the most, the person you tell every secret, the person who has seen you at your highest and your lowest. Home isn’t always a place. Home is a state of being.
And sometimes, your home can be in your room, laughing with your friend on the phone, playing a silly little block game.
But everything has its season, and all good things must come to an end eventually. You can’t spend every summer shut up in your room playing the same game with the same friends. It has to change eventually. Everything has to change. Everything does change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes friends fight, or drift apart, or make changes to their relationship, or just remove the relationship altogether. Sometimes the game gets abandoned, forgotten, as something new and cool is focused on for a while. Some come back to it, some don’t. Because things change.
People change.
People grow up.
People lose that feeling. The feeling of logging onto your world and thinking, “Alright. Here we go. Time to escape yet again.” Because sometimes your real home isn’t in the real world. Maybe it’s a collection of pixels on a screen. Maybe that’s where you feel the most safe. The most at peace. The most happy.
But there are a lot of unhappy people out there. Because people mature and they lose that feeling. People mature and they lose their sense of wonder, their curiosity, their joy, their peace, their confidence, their happiness.
Because that’s what happens when you grow up.
But don’t cry over it. Don’t cry over everything you have lost over time. Think about what you have gained. Think about the memories you have, and the relationships you built, even if they aren’t still here. Think about all the different builds, the different pets, the different songs. Don’t regret the passed time, appreciate it. Don’t mourn because that time is gone, but smile because it happened.
“We didn’t realize we were making memories. We just knew we were having fun.”
—Winnie the Pooh
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