Not Sparro

There's a little star-eyed, cotton candy cub in the tent whom Amber wants. She resets Animal Crossing 15 times trying to get the right villager to be sacrificed so that the cub, Judy, will move. There are a few villagers whom Amber does not like, including a pink bear named Megan. It would be a fair exchange, a bear for a bear.

If we could tell Megan to leave, that would be one thing. They decide off-screen and without our input who will be on the chopping block. Our only recourse is to shut down the game when Judy says the wrong name.

But there must be an agreement between Judy and the one who will leave. The cotton candy cub kept suggesting other villagers, including an eagle and a pangolin, both whom Amber cherishes. She couldn't sacrifice them.

Finally, it comes on a bird named Sparro, who is a jock villager. (There are a set number of personalities the animal villagers can have. Megan is normal, the most boring orientation possible. Judy is snooty and I like her less for that rhyming.) Sparro is the first one who I discovered on another island and invited to move in. We already had a jock, a pink bunny that is always in a blue tracksuit, and so Sparro was redundant. Amber didn't like him because his house was a sandbox.

When Amber makes the final confirmation to send Sparro packing, I feel struck. I didn't know that I was especially attached to Sparro. It's possible that I'm not.

I go about my nightly routine, and then I go down to the bedroom to read and instead bawl. I cannot explain why this is the trigger, only that it is. He was innocent and doofy. Now, our iteration of him will cease to exist.

My despair here has little to do with a video game character moving out of our candy-colored village.

Over one-hundred thousand Americans have died from coronavirus since it hit our shores. Our president considers this death toll, still mounting, a success. We are in one of the darkest times of my life, though other people have it much worse than I do. I am heaped with subtle (and not so subtle) trauma daily. I don't know what a normal day is anymore. It has been months of not trusting what the next week will bring. Months of not being able to touch a human being aside from Amber. There is no schedule. I burn out looking at the news and social media, but I feel disconnected and drift without that anchor.

I cannot process a tragedy of this caliber in part because it has not affected me in the most severe ways. No one I know has died or failed to mostly recover. I have ended my social life, I have lost months of instruction with my students, I have felt my mental health slipping, but no one I know has suffered much physically (the long-term financial toll is not clearly seen yet). It makes this atrocity more abstract. It is like water in Flint, the pipeline in Standing Rock, the camps of migrants at the border. I know these things are happening. I work to help when as much as I can, but I do not feel them as deeply as they deserve.

Because I cannot cry for a hundred thousand people I don't know, I cry for a bird who was perpetually happy to see me. (The villagers are incapable of expressing much negative emotion toward the player. The closest is a goat named Pashmina, who has the sisterly personality, which translates into mild sarcasm. She is thus our favorite.)

This dam almost burst a week ago, when our rat Ratticus died from respiratory issues. He passed away in Amber's hands, gasping as she tried to keep him alive using massage and an eyedropper. Watching our rat stretch wide his mouth, his incisors like needles (though he would never bite Amber, even in his death throes), struggling for breath, I almost joked that he had coronavirus. I couldn't stand to do this, in part because I couldn't invoke COVID, the rest because I had known for days that Ratticus couldn't survive much longer. Rats, even domestic ones, are not long-lived beasties.

Amber cried over Ratticus, though they were small tears, guilty. She refuses to believe that she is incapable of chiding back the death of animals and always believes they die because she was insufficient.

We are both adrift, waiting for a time when society will be something we can rejoin in full. Amber's Animal Crossing island is one of our constants and escapes. It gives a set number of low-key tasks every day. It is a project on which we can collaborate.

Something else will set me off soon, allowing me more misplaced catharsis for the tragedy of 2020. It won't be a videogame this time. A book, maybe, or a conversation about something irrelevant. I rarely feel right anymore, but rightness is more subjective these days. Last year, my reactions might be indicative of the morbid tipping of my mood imbalance. This unprecedented year, it is coping as best as I can in the circumstances.

Soon in Xenology: Probably more about COVID-19, since, you know, the world is ending and everything. George Floyd and protests.

last watched: Space Force
reading: Holidays with Bigfoot