I breathed life into this poem as an attempt to expand my emotional vocabulary—to exercise the muscles needed to describe what still resists description. It lives in that blunt moment when loneliness loses its temporal quality and begins to feel structural.
Here, I explore long-held trauma, survival, and detachment, alongside an uneasy question: Is meaning something we discover, or something we invent to keep going?
Continue?
Single-Player Only
I reached for a color,
and it was black.
I screamed for help,
and it was a fist.
I cried from the pain,
and got the belt.
I hid from the monster,
and I was ignored.
Finally.
Thankfully.
Ignored.
This isn’t fair.
Life isn’t fair.
Fairness is a lie.
I am alone.
I am adrift.
I am lost in a world
I don’t recognize.
I don’t belong.
I can’t belong.
And every day I care
a little less.
About not caring
more.
A lie told to children.
I don’t want to be.
To be is to suffer.
I don’t want to suffer
anymore.
I want it to be OK.
I want arms to hold me.
I want to be loved.
I want to be covered up
and rocked to sleep.
Forever.
A human invention.
Work hard.
Be responsible.
Be a good person.
Be anything.
No one cares.
We are a random fluctuation
in a vast nothing.
And our existence doesn’t matter.
Blips.
Motes.
Particles.
Wavicles.
Here, one minute
gone, the next.
Game over.
Thanks for playing.
Continue?
Insert quarter.
Next.
Writing this poem felt less like storytelling and more like excavation. With each section, another assumption—fairness, belonging, purpose—falls away until only existence itself remains: a blinking prompt asking whether we want to continue.
I’m an ’80s child. I can still smell the arcade—the warm, moist air, a dank twist of teenage sweat and hormones, quarters—electronic voices spilling from a Gauntlet machine. The gaming imagery arrived late, but it reframed everything. Video games promise steady, forward progress, rules, and eventual reward. Life, of course, makes no such guarantees. Sometimes it feels less like a shared experience and more like a single-player campaign running on dusty green circuitboards.
And yet the question still appears:
Continue?
Perhaps the question answers itself simply by being asked.
