Vekinuma's Website

I started writing this a while ago, and only recently completed it. I was inspired by another story, so I made my own with Team Fortress. Enjoy.

I never really had an interest for video games. I was like other kids, I would play outside, hang out with friends, play some basketball or catch; I loved the sun and surrounding myself with other people. This was my life for a while. My parents always forced me to go out and see the neighbors. We didn’t have a computer at home, so the only times I was able to use the internet were when I was at school. Even then, it was limited.

Sometimes my friends would talk about the internet. I was only about 10 years old so I didn’t really know how to explain to them that I didn’t have a computer at home. It was so weird. They had iPods and would talk about Call of Duty, porn, and Grand Theft Auto. I was basically unable to enter these conversations at this age. Maybe for the better. Ignorance is bliss after all. In the end, we still could play together. We would have fun playing tag, catch, or just running around like dumb children. Unfortunately, ignorance is not all encompassing, and it does not last forever.

We got our first computer when I was 11. It was some Dell OptiPlex. I don’t really know how new or old it was for the time, but it ran Windows 7 just fine and I was able to browse the internet on it. Supposedly my parents needed it for work related reasons but they never went into details as to what exactly that meant. Arguably an 11-year-old wouldn’t have been able to understand, but they could have tried simplifying it for me. There is the possibility that they actually didn’t need it for work, but hidden within my contemplations, I’m still uncertain. Although, it didn’t really matter in the end. I had access to a computer now, and that would change the course of my life.

Coincidentally, at the same time, my friends began to talk of Minecraft. I had no idea of what it was, but clearly, they were hooked, and I wanted to spend more time with them. I loved being outside and feeling the grass on my feet, but there were times it was too cold to go outside. Winters sucked here, New Jersey had always seemed to be a state that one should avoid, if possible, another unexplainable decision my parents had refused to explain to me. Anyway, Minecraft had consumed my friends. Instead of playing outside, they were inside on their computers. I wanted in on the fun too, why would my whole group of friends be able to connect but I’m left out? It just wasn’t fair.

I begged my parents for Minecraft. More particularly, my mother. I would tell her my friends were all playing together and I was the only one left out. She, fairly, did not understand exactly how the internet worked. So, to hear that my friends, which were young and a bit on the slower side, were “hosting a Minecraft server” and were able to “play together” this way, she was a bit skeptical. However, she was my mother, and she wanted to see me happy. Eventually she went to the site, entered her credit card details, and bought the game for me. I don’t believe I’ve felt such a rush of dopamine in my entire life until Team Fortress 2 entered my conscious existence.

Anyway, I was in. It was not actually my friends who had set up the server, but one of their fathers. He was apparently a “System Administrator” but to me that meant nothing because I had no idea what it meant. The Dell OptiPlex was far from a machine built for video games, but it was able to handle some Minecraft gaming, albeit, whatever the experience was, I probably would have accepted it. The amount of stimulation I was receiving as a result of playing a video game was much more than I had ever experienced. In the end, this computer was able to run Minecraft just fine. To my immature and feeble eyes, 30 fps was a thing of beauty, to see graphics on a screen and my interactions on the mouse and keyboard replicated into a video game were beyond me. We never had a console in the house. Although we did have television, two huge CRT televisions, and we had VHS tapes of some old movies. Occasionally, as a family, we would watch a Christmas movie as a family. It was alright, as I began maturing, I grew away from the enjoyment of watching a movie with my family, but at this time, it was still enjoyable, I had not developed into a monster. I still had not known what would become of the person that once was, and the end of beauty itself.

During Spring and Summer, I was still going outside, albeit less than the previous year. At school I would still play sports at recess, run around with my friends, and be generally extraverted, but my mind would wander away to the computer screen. I was doing great in my classes. Maybe it didn’t matter that much at that time, but I was getting an A in every class. My parents were very proud of me and would bring me out to a restaurant if I achieved good grades every marking period, and so that was a goal of mine. Too, at this time, food still gave me dopamine. I felt good when I ate food. I enjoyed it. Later, sadly, this ended up no longer being the case. A common occurrence in my life has been finding something that gives me satisfaction, abusing it until I feel nothing, and then moving onto the next thing. This works until you reach the ultimate thing, the thing to give you all that you possibly can take in, and indeed, I had found this, and it has only ruined my life.

Minecraft was on my mind. I loved it. At first, I had no idea what I was doing because of my lack of video game or general computer experience, but that straightened out and I was on the server daily. If I recall correctly, this was the period where Minecraft had introduced the hunger bar, which was an update that many didn’t like. In my mind, I had no problem with it, it had been all I ever experienced. Hunger bar or not, I was going to play Minecraft. So, I did. I learned via trial and error more than anything, I was not acquainted with the internet enough to begin searching for wikis or information online. The structures I built were phallic in essence and my parents became increasingly worried as they looked over my shoulder and saw what could only resemble a penis on the screen. Fortunately, with enough convincing, I would tell them it was “my house” and I would walk in, show them the chests, workbench, furnace, and then they would ease up a bit. I didn’t understand the fear, but in the years coming, their fear would become a reality.

In school, I began day dreaming more often. Rather than paying any attention to my teacher, my mind would wander to what I could be doing in Minecraft. The server was still up after months my friend’s interests began to dissipate, but mine only grew. They would float onto a different video game: Roblox. For me, however, that didn’t hit the spot. It was free to play so I did download it, with my parent’s permission of course, and tried out a few games within Roblox, but they never meant anything to me. Roblox is probably the most nihilistic video game I have played to date. Never have I felt such meaninglessness from playing a video game. Video games are merely a means to consume, but Roblox brought this to a whole new level within the context of my eleven-year-old pea brain. Obviously, I had no means of identifying “nihilism” but I most definitely could feel boredom, and within Roblox that boredom had been attached similarly to my feeling of being a speck on this ever-expanding universe. Roblox taught me my actions were meaningless, because I could be building something in one world, but the work I had done would never save. I could build something, and then come back, and it wouldn’t be there. If this was the case, why would anyone build anything in the first place? If I had continued playing Roblox, I don’t know what could have happened.

This was the end of 4th grade and school was out. I was hoping for a wonderful Summer of playing Minecraft, but to my disappointment, the server was shut down. Not only was I disappointed, I had lost my mind. I tried calling my friend who “hosted” the server and the explanation was that he “didn’t care anymore.” Of course, I fucking cared. I was playing on it daily now. How dare they take it away from me? Hours and hours of playing on that fucking server and now they were going to take that time away from me? I should have known this was a sign from God that time would begin to tear away from me. Any time I would put energy into something it would decay into dust and leave me wondering why I would ever try in the first place. This was supposed to be the lesson learned with Roblox, but no, here it was, staring at me in the face, as a result of a Minecraft server being shut down. My builds gone. So much time lost, simply because someone didn’t care anymore. My feelings swiftly forgotten, or perhaps, not even acknowledged. I was crying. My mom tried comforting me, but she didn’t clearly understand what was going on.

“Why are you crying over a game, hun?” she would ask.

“Because I loved it and I put a lot of time into it,” I would reply.

Then silence. She rubbed my back and tried to make me feel safe, but it was over. I would have to find something or somewhere else. Oddly enough, she didn’t inquire about my friends. Perhaps in her mind, feeble like mine, they were the reason to have caused this, and to spend time with them would bring no good. Maybe it wasn’t so odd after all. I probably would have done the same thing. It seems that all we have in this world are people, and this was one of the first times that I learned that others cannot be trusted with things I care about.

A week passed and I began working on my singleplayer world. Things were different now. Despite playing on the server with myself most of the time, taking on this new world made things feel a lot colder and lonelier. At least I had it in my mind that my progress wouldn’t leave me, but there was no one to view my progress besides myself. A rarity, my father might have accidently looked in my direction and saw what I was doing on the computer, and even more unlikely inquired about it, and that would have been the extent of my world being caught by eyes other than my own. Did it even matter? In the context of my childish mind, I tried convincing myself it didn’t matter that others wouldn’t see what I would be up to. I tried so hard to make myself believe that the only thing that mattered was my own satisfaction. That the only thing that truly mattered would be whether or not I was having fun and enjoying myself. However, I needed to be with others, and by playing alone, I was spending time on something for no reason, no purpose, no anything. The builds would only mean something to me if I wired myself to believe they did, and that wasn’t going to happen at this age. Another critical life lesson learned too early for me to appreciate, I had no way of conceptualizing my insignificance in the world quite yet, so eventually the singleplayer world would be scrapped due to, as the only label I knew which held the feelings I felt: “loneliness.”

Time passed awfully quickly for someone so young. Oh yeah, I’m totally a big boy now, 12 and a half. Or so I believed myself to be a big boy, and an enlightened one at that. Puberty had begun and so my thinking had also begun to change. The people I viewed as friends I started to stray away from. The qualities I thought I liked about them were no longer the same. Being inherently outgoing was no longer enough for me now. You had to hold some sort of intectuallism, at least for a 12-year-old. I’m kidding. Half kidding. I didn’t want to associate with those people because they had kicked me out of the group for being a loser, or a loser in their eyes. I infrequently went outside at this point and stuck to the computer like taffy to teeth. I was finally learning more about the internet. I had begun modding Minecraft, finding servers to play on with randoms, and interacting with those randoms via means like Skype.

Instead of opting to find new friends in the real world, online friends took their place. “Ah yes, these people really understand me!” Well, they did a good job of convincing me this was the case. My parents grew ever worrisome, well, my mother anyway. She would tell me I should go outside like I previously did, but my response would be something along the lines of, “I don’t want to anymore.” As most would agree, this is quite disconcerting to a mother of a 12-year-old boy. She didn’t force me to do anything though. She never offered anything either. Sometimes she would kick me off the computer so she could do whatever it was she found so especially necessary. Facebook, how lovely, very important business when I had friends on Skype waiting for my presence! As her use on the computer was ever-increasing, I knew the next step would be to get my own computer for my own needs.

Summer work. I was big enough to handle mowing lawns, so that’s what I did. I would go from door to door, with help from my uncle, mowing lawns. I would do extra work, with, once again, the help of my uncle, in other forms of landscaping. It worked out. Two and a half months passed and I had raised a glorious 800 dollars. My uncle didn’t want any of the money, but he would touch me in weird ways. I only half knew what was going on. He told me it was necessary “in the arrangement.” He threatened to not let me keep any of the money if he couldn’t touch me, and said he would tell my parents that I had stolen money from him if I said anything about it to anyone. I mentally distanced myself from the situation each time it happened, and I tried focusing on what I was doing this for: a computer. That helped me get through those moments, but the damage it caused is not so clear. I wonder what brings someone to defile a child like that.

I wish there would have been another means of making money. It seems most kids would receive gifts or money on their birthdays, maybe even if the parents were financially able, both. Unfortunately for me, I received neither. In fact, my mother pretended like I didn’t have a birthday. I didn’t even know it was normal in society to celebrate birthdays until I had spent more time with other kids. I had never gone to any of their parties because my mother refused to give me permission to go. We were allowed to go anywhere else, do whatever else, but for some odd reason, the birthdays were off limits. It didn’t mean much to me, I just wanted to know why I was different, and I would ask her, but no response would come. At this point, I wanted to know my own birthday, and legally, it was on paper, the hospital knew when I was born, but my mom wouldn’t budge. “I don’t know, I don’t remember, it doesn’t matter,” she would say. I eventually asked one of my teachers at school, and they seemed a little worried, but that’s how elementary school English teachers all act, right? I was born on October 10th. I would have never known what this date would mean to me later on. Did my mom know? Had she seen the future? Is that why she gave up on me?

Despite the lack of any gifts, through my hard work, I earned enough money to get a computer. Now I thought, surely, this would be enough to have my own personal computer, and indeed it was. My mother was against the idea in general, she thought it would have been better to put it away into my savings, which continually appeared mysterious or nonexistent to me, as I had never seen the account. But no, it was time for a computer. She drove me to BestBuy for me to pick and choose what I would begin using as my OWN computer for my OWN means. I viewed their desktops, and I needed some sort of combo. I would have to get something that came with a monitor, so the idea of a laptop came to mind. However, I pushed it away, I knew that wouldn’t last as long. With all the forums I had read, laptops were a no-go if I wanted to maximize my personal computing experience. Instead, I opted for a HP desktop that came with a 21-inch LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse. A whole 700 dollars. I worked hard for this, and it was worth it, despite the uncle.

Where would it go in my room? Good question. Not a large room, but surely, I could fit a desk in here as well. On the way home we passed a yard-sale and my mother couldn’t stop herself from pulling in. I would keep my upset feelings inside as she looked around at all the garbage she wouldn’t be buying. I never understood this. Why would you spend your precious time on this Earth looking at things you aren’t going to buy, use, or even fucking need? We’re all going to die and you want to spend your blip of a lifetime looking at garbage, and now I have to deal with it too? How absolutely awful. Anyway, it worked out for me in the end. A mere thirty dollars and the shitty desk would be mine. It definitely had been places one does not name, but it most definitely would fit in my room. The person holding the yard sale helped my mother and I get it in the truck. Yeah, she had a truck. For what purpose? Who knows? She never used it for any reason beyond saying she had a truck to other people. Thankfully, it came in handy once, once is better than never, especially across an entire lifetime.

My mother and I got it into the house and into my room. I finally felt like my life was coming together. As if everything would be complete with a computer, but I guess to a 12-year-old, there isn’t much more to be had in the world. A bed, desk, dresser, and a computer. What more could you ask for? I genuinely didn’t know what more I could ask of life. I used pledge to clean the desk and the artificial lemon smell filtered out the smell of death that was left on the desk. Maybe someone actually was murdered on this desk, and their corpse was left on it for a few days. Maybe. Whatever, lemon it is. I set up the desktop at my feet and the monitor, keyboard, and mouse atop the desk. Beautiful, probably the most beautiful sight I had ever seen with my bloodshot eyes. I turned it on. The cheap plastic felt like expensive jewels in my underdeveloped mind.

I pressed the power button and nothing happened. I almost had a fucking freakout. I just spent all my summer money on a computer that isn’t going to work? We were an hour and a half away from the BestBuy we bought the computer at, there was not the slightest chance we would be driving back anytime soon, especially with the horrible gas mileage her truck had. I had a mini-heart attack until I realized I hadn’t plugged in the computer. Somehow, in my negligence and excitement, I didn’t plug the power supply into the wall. I however, did plug in the monitor to power, and the accessories; keyboard, mouse, and monitor, were all plugged into the desktop itself. How embarrassing. There was no one to see but I was very upset at myself for freaking out for about ten minutes before even checking the power. I plugged in the power and it booted right up.

Windows 7 my beloved. Still alive and kicking, no Windows 8 in my life quite yet, although in 2012 there most definitely was Windows 8. Seems like HP wasn’t ready to put that shitty operating system on their computers quite yet, I lucked out. Obviously, I could have just installed Windows 7 at a later time but I didn’t have that extensive of computer knowledge, so I was fortunate enough to have things as they should have been out of the box. What a time to be alive, you could buy a product and the product you received wouldn’t have to be tampered with or adjusted, you would just use it as is. Now, technology sucks, and you have to tweak everything about it to make it suit your needs and not automatically update or force you to upgrade your hardware which most definitely does not need upgrading, I love destroying the Earth with continued computer waste!

I set up my own login with my own name and password. It was truly my computer for once and for all. No longer could my mother browse Facebook and strip me away from my Minecraft antics. Of course, those aforementioned Minecraft antics were beginning to dim anyway. I still was into modding and playing with myself in singleplayer worlds, but sometimes I would go on online servers, but it was slowly getting farther away from me. Still, until Team Fortress 2 entered my life, Minecraft would be it. Well, until Steam came around.

Reading online for Minecraft mods would lead me to a variety of forums online, but most notably, I’d receive a lot of results from Reddit. From there I would do further research. “Oh, I wonder what this person also posted.” Then, I found it. r/tf2. I liked cartoons. Perhaps that’s what caught my eye. I always preferred having Minecraft with the Sphax BDcraft texture pack installed, and on this computer I had it on 128x instead of 64x of the previous one. It would run just fine now, which really pleased me, but this new video game “tf2” most definitely caught my eye. It sparkled like no other game I had seen up until now, they usually looked dull and boring. When I had done later research on the games my ex-friends talked about, like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, I was left bored and uninterested. Why replicate reality when you could take it and morph it into something new and interesting? Cartoony styles did just that for me, in the visual aspect anyway. Reality, gritty and grainy, mostly undesirable, turned into soft and squishy, most definitely desirable! Obviously, these weren’t my exact thoughts then, I couldn’t exactly put my finger on what I liked about that cartoon style, but it caught me by surprise, and I had to learn more.

I scrolled on and on within Firefox, because I no longer had to abide by my mother’s rules on the computer. I could install whatever software I wanted, whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted. In addition, the internet connection wasn’t totally abhorrent. I’ll take ADSL over dial-up or whatever, I just want to be able to play online and download a few things here and there. I wasn’t even frequenting YouTube at the time, I was safe and sound. Well, it didn’t take long for it to all go downhill. I now had a bit less than a month before school started up again, and I would have to occupy myself somehow. Minecraft would take its place for the most part. I hadn’t been frequenting singleplayer worlds often at this time, so I thought it was fine to leave my progress on the old computer for now. “I’ll just move it over later,” I thought to myself. How foolish of me. Thankfully, I would be ignorant of my loss for the moment, I’d be too busy on public Tekkit servers building my empire. Being so utterly focused on Minecraft allowed my mind to drift away from the subreddit I saw, and it gave me a little more time to grow before I would be exposed to changes, changes beyond belief, mind you.

Time disappeared out of thin air. Maybe it would take me a while to realize, but time lost never comes back. Some may say that time having fun is not wasted time, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that paradigm. However, unfortunately for me, I never knew what level of time sink I was capable of. Ten hours a day for four weeks straight of Minecraft. Now I was locked in my room, staring a screen, basically alone, with some ability to communicate with people online. Skype calls and whatever were better than nothing, but it was not like having friends in real life that you could see face-to-face and actually feel their presence. I had to make do. For whatever reason, I genuinely felt unwanted. I was thrown out of one friend group so I had this belief that no one else would want me either, so I just dealt with the pain by the means of Minecraft. It did a pretty fine job; however, the thoughts of new video games would linger into my mind.

School was whatever. I had hated being taken away from my hours of Minecraft, but what could you do? 280 hours of Minecraft wasn’t even a big deal. It was easy to put time in and then go to bed. Sure, I would eat and drink, take showers, whatever, but then after the mandatory human upkeep was taken care of, back to Minecraft. I think because I took care of myself my parents didn’t really care. Not having friends? Well, how could they judge, what friends DID they have? Well, I don’t know about my father, I didn’t see him, but my mother on the other hand, she was always on the phone. She could not stop talking. I didn’t know a human being was capable of speaking this much. I was actually a little envious, she would be a great public speaker if she learned how to speak correctly; in a way to manipulate others, I mean. She wouldn’t stop. Everyone would love listening to her go on and on about something they genuinely believed she cared about. Well, that never happened, two decades too late I suppose. Although, I am most definitely not in a position to judge others for their lack of acting upon reality. What have I become?

Maybe then it wasn’t so terrible. I still had things I was forced to do, but even that was waning. I stopped caring about school. Maybe I was smart when I was younger, but now it actually would take effort if I wanted to do well in classes, and I most definitely wasn’t going to dedicate video game energy towards information in class. What did these teachers know anyway? Oh yeah, I most definitely need to focus on learning about Christopher Columbus, thanks teach. I most definitely need to memorize my times tables, phew, what the hell would that come in handy for anyway? Didn’t they see the rise of the smartphone coming? What absolute buffoons. Don’t even get me started on this “x” and “y” thing, what the actual fuck? We were dealing with numbers but now we have these extra variables? For what exactly? It clearly didn’t help me anyway, but all I had to do was pass the class. The days of going out to the restaurant were over. Not that it mattered anymore, that would be cutting into my video game time, which is something I most definitely would not want to happen. I stopped eating with my mother, I just ate in my room and stared at the Minecraft chat of the server I most frequented. She tried to stop me at first, but she quickly realized her efforts were futile, and gave me up to the video games, seeing that I was already drifting away. Maybe she could have saved me, even for a little bit, but what would have that done? Who fucking cares.

What the hell started this anyway? Playing Minecraft with my friends online? Shouldn’t I have become completely antagonistic towards the people who introduced me to such as a thing, even after they pushed me away? It didn’t make sense, is this what addiction feels like? Thankfully at that age, I never had drugs, yet, some kids at school would talk about their parents or older siblings doing drugs. I didn’t know what weed was, but I did know what cigarettes were, but that was the extent of my little boy knowledge. Luckily, I had no idea what would come. The 48-hour sessions of playing Team Fortress 2 methed up beyond imagination. That truly destroyed my mind, did it in. I could have ended up alright if those long weeks didn’t occur. Maybe I could have repaired myself, been a part of society, actually working towards something that mattered that wasn’t video games. But no, it didn’t happen. Oh well, what could I do now? I had lost the game; I might as well keep it going with the amphetamines.

Ah, well, anyway, with enough of this constant Minecraft-ing, I began having dreams of the game. I was actually in Minecraft. I didn’t know this was possible. I was punching the trees with my fists, and they were breaking. I felt no pain in punching any of the blocks, my arms too, were blocky. It didn’t feel real, yet I had not felt such a realistic dream up until this point. I kept on going. I broke a couple trees down, crafted a workbench, made some wooden tools, and I was actually just playing through Minecraft and I took the perspective of the protagonist I was controlling, instead of being merely the puppeteer, I was the puppeteer and the puppet. I had mostly spent my time playing modded Minecraft in recent times, so to end up in a dream world where it was vanilla was pretty unusual to me. Despite this, I would keep on “playing” or rather, living, it was survival after all. Unusual to swing a pixelated sword at a pixelated pig for it to drop some fake meat that I could eat raw, right there, at that moment. After building a basic house, killing some animals, and collecting some iron, I was out of the dream world.

I woke up in a fowl smelling sweat and had to take a hot shower immediately. I especially spent a lot of time scrubbing my underarms and ass, I didn’t know I could sweat that much in those two places. I had never woken up in a sweat unless I was sick, so in my initial reasoning, this must have had to be a one-time occurrence. What wishful thinking, no, it would not be. It would be short-lived, but two weeks of playing Minecraft in your dreams, without any real choice, isn’t as fun as you might make it out to be. Sure, maybe night one and two were fun, but then it became tiring. I didn’t want to have to try and survive in my mind and then wake up and try to survive, in a different way, my life wasn’t of a hunter-gatherer, but it was unenjoyable just the same. Time was beginning to move along at a faster rate too, school was moving along quickly and my time spent playing Minecraft was being shifted into reading information on the internet. Was this better? Worse? I can’t be sure.

Like said, the dreams went on. One night I spent an entire dream just mining. It’s different from staring at a computer screen. I was actually in the cave, placing torches on the walls of the cave. It was genuinely cold and I wished I had some better clothing, my steps had echoes and I had to keep an eye out for monsters that wanted to take my life away from me. Although I knew it was a dream at this point, I felt unable to get myself out of this Minecraft world, and continued the train of irrationality, I thought if I died in my dream, I would die in real life. So, when I was out for a mine, I was extra alert, listening for all and any footsteps, any growls from zombies, or the bones of skeletons. Thankfully, playing the safe route kept me pretty safe and I would successfully obtain a total of 16 diamonds in my two weeks of suffering. Not bad, but I did not go to the nether. I thought about it, but I was genuinely too frightened by the idea. Entering a hell-esque world when I was already fearful of going out in the dark? Of course it wasn’t going to happen. I had so many thoughts in reference to going to the nether. Would I genuinely feel burning if I fell into the lava? What would happen if I accidently hit a pigman? What about the ghasts firing explosive shells at me? What if they shot the portal and closed it; could I even get back? Too many questions, too many fears, and there was no way I was going to take any more risks.

I didn’t. Why should I do the unnecessary? Well, I could have laid in the Minecraft bed for the entirety of the dream, now that I had a house fleshed out, a farm, and I didn’t really need to go out exploring anymore. Yet, there was this itch, maybe the itch of being a human being, but I wanted adventure. I wanted to go out and see what the world had offered me, what I could find in this very specific world generation. Then it hit me. This world was like the one I initially played on in the singleplayer world on the family computer. That’s what the generation was based on, what I didn’t realize was that my mind wasn’t going to just go ahead and generate a whole new Minecraft world for me to live in. I was not creative, and it most definitely was not capable of that anyway. I spent hours upon hours in that world, the visuals must have ingrained themselves into the hippocampus of my brain, never to be lost, so that I may always come back to it for… survival reasons. Thank goodness I was born as a human so I could hold onto my Minecraft world until my death.

It passed. The dreams finally faded and so did the horrible sweating that would come after. I was not one to shower after waking up, but I had essentially become a ghost, so my mom didn’t even say anything to me. Normal dreams did not replace my Minecraft nightmares though, they would be chaotic and horrifying. An example of this was a dream where I was in history class, listening to the teacher ramble about the Constitution, writing something about manifest destiny on the chalkboard, but then the door of the class was opened. What stood there? A zombie pigman from the nether, except instead of having a gold sword, he had a chainsaw in both hands, and was staring right at me. He clearly wasn’t interested in murdering the teacher or any of the other children today, so I wondered why he had his eyes set on me. The classroom was arranged in such a way that the desks were combined together, to make little groups, and I was facing the door in the farthest corner, protected by two classmates who “sat in front of me,” or I should say, were closer to the door than I was in our little group. Still though, those red eyes were staring right at me.

He ran towards me, chainsaw revving up, the smell of gasoline filling the room, but I awoke before he could murder me. Sometimes I wonder if he got to me, would I die? Well in the dream, yeah, it sounded utterly and completely horrific, but it wouldn’t have been so bad to die in real life as a result of the dream. If I had knew what I would become later on, would I have taken the easy route and escaped this world of misery and cravings? Maybe. That’s too much pressure to put on a young teenager anyway. Being by myself wasn’t helping. The only outlet I had for my feelings were people online, and it’s not like people online have the best or most intelligent things to say. I doubt kids around that age would’ve had anything nice to say, but I’m a sure at least a few would have been, at the very least, comforting to my situation and would have tried to make me feel better, or may have told me things are going to be okay, but no, that didn’t happen, and it was my own fault. It seemed I was genuinely too self-focused, I was always thinking of me, no one else. I didn’t want to. I wanted to think about other people, I didn’t think I was all that interesting, it’s just that I had no one else to think about. Maybe that unintentionally turned me into a narcissist. Oh well, what could one do now? This seems to be a common trend of my life. I mess up once as a child, don’t fix it, and it hurts me in the long run, or I believe it to. I try to explain everything, despite not everything being explainable.

Time passes. Half a school year passes. A full school year passes. Who fucking cares? Information in one ear, out the other, staying just long enough for the inevitable test on my quick memorization of the information. Day dreaming about being somewhere else, as someone else, doing what you might ask? Playing video games, what else? It is what it is. I finally started talking to people again throughout the year at least. Well, it was less-so me trying to interact with them but more-so them forcing themselves onto me. Not in the sexual way, but in conversation. Forcing conversation. I put up with it, and then realized it can be enjoyable to socialize with people in real life. It had been so long since I had last talked with a human being beyond small talk in real life. I forgot it was a thing that could even occur, I was too focused on getting lost and forgetting reality that I forgot that reality could offer me things directly that would ease the pain of living. Well, I’m grateful for these people. At this age now, about 14 or so, I had my own cellular phone. Not a smartphone, but just a normal call and text phone. It did the job; everyone was about the same, in my area anyway. Smartphones hadn’t taken over the middle school yet; it would be another few years until that would happen, around the second year of high school I saw it take off fully.

Anyway, these few people meant a lot to me at the time. They lacked the prejudice I was used to experiencing with other kids. They seemed to have the ability to think for themselves, something crucial for communicating with me at the time. I could find parrot after parrot if I wanted to, sheep were endless, but to have someone take information in and decide for themselves what to think of it? I was very fortunate, to say the least. On top of this, guess what they liked? Video games. Perfect. I have been saying “video games” but only have made clear of my love for Minecraft. This is true, because Minecraft is as close to a perfect video game as there ever will be. Notch knew exactly what he was doing, and that game has ruined me in every way possible because I never felt the same way after I found diamonds. Thanks Notch, for ruining my life. These friends also liked Minecraft, but more importantly, they spoke of that game I saw on reddit, “Team Fortress 2” or “TF2.”

There was this feeling in the back of my head, I didn’t know if it was warning me of what was to come or I just had random pain. Although I should have known it was a warning. I downloaded Steam with their instructions, instructions I did not need, mind you, but they wanted to explain it to me anyway. At this point we were all connected via Skype, so communication was a breeze. I made an account, my username irrelevant, and I started downloading the video game. Thankfully, it was free-to-play by this time, so I was merely a few clicks away. It took a couple hours but I was good to go. In the meantime, I talked to my new-found friends on Skype while I played on Minecraft. At the time, I didn’t think all that much of it. This wasn’t too far off from what I was used to, talking to people online and playing a video game. It had become my life outside of the mandatory needs of being a human and going to school. At some times, I didn’t believe there to be anything other than this; video games, people online, and school. What else could there to be to life? I could imagine in my fickle mind that I would go to college and repeat the same thing, in a dorm room playing a video game, but no, I wouldn’t go down that route. Team Fortress would consume me, eat me alive, vomit me back up, then eat me again.

I had really begun to learn more about computers and software during this period of time. Maybe at first, I started learning how people communicated online so I ended up using Skype. There was other software out there, some Minecraft servers preferred using TeamSpeak but I never felt myself needing to use it, enough people used Skype that I could talk to enough people that way. It was fine enough. It was fine, I was fine. I started using Firefox, it had the most extensions, and I preferred having lots of options, even if I didn’t use them, because it made me feel like I had freedom. Ironically, this comes into play when I played TF2. I thought I had a choice to play or not to play, but I actually had no choice. I was forced. There never has been any choice for me.

I started skipping school. I would explain to my mom that I didn’t feel well, and this had some truth to it. I genuinely did not feel well if I didn’t play. When I read that it was “the most fun online” and it was now free, I felt like I was being lied to. There’s no way that’s true, I thought. I have never been so totally wrong in my entire life. I didn’t think about it, I just knew I had to play, at any cost. If I passed my classes, everything would be fine. Sometimes my mom would still force me to school, and I could only fight back so often. It would never escalate, I would never yell or hit my mother, that’s totally and utterly wrong, but I would most definitely lie to her if it meant getting closer to my lover.

Do you have any idea what it’s like being someone like me? No one gets it. No one understands how it feels to be destroyed like this. I would never wish this upon anyone. I would have rather been an African child, starving to death, dehydrated, with no education. In that world, I would have never touched TF2. I would have rather been addicted to opioids, codeine, fucking anything else. Whatever.

It finished downloading. It was time to play for the first time, my friends added me on Steam. I didn’t really know how to use the UI at this point, but they walked me through on how to use it. Open my library, click on TF2, and click play, pretty simple, right? Almost too simple. It was like a trap. I was being trapped. I should have known. What about divine intervention? I thought God might be real, I would believe in “God” occasionally, but those thoughts would fade as I began to grow into a nihilist. God, you’ve got to be kidding, you’ve got to be a fool! Well sure, probably a fool, but if there was a God, this would have been their chance to save me. Turn off the internet, kill my computer, spontaneously have me banned from Steam, anything to save my soul from this horrible ending. Nope.

God is dead, or they were never alive, whatever. That power had its chance. Or maybe I’m totally wrong, this is what God wanted. God wanted me to suffer. It wouldn’t surprise me. Look what that fucker did to Job, that’s like, about as half as bad as what is happening to me. I loaded it up. The audio was loud. For the record, I’ve been using speakers, I didn’t have headphones. The monitor that came with the desktop had built in speakers that did the job fine, it also had a built-in microphone which my friends complained of being of poor quality, but what was I going to do, buy a headset? Not a chance. I’m not interested in another summer with my uncle just to buy a couple of things.

I was in. As much as one who didn’t clearly understand what was going on could be in, anyway. I was walked through firstly in lowering the volume, then video settings. These people seemed to have more of an aptitude for hardware than software, as they had asked the “specs” of my computer, and my response was, “I have no idea what that means.” They clarified with “specifications” and I understood a little better, and thankfully I had held onto to the box of the computer still. AMD A10-5700, 12gb of ram, 500gb hard drive, yeah, I’m sure this information is very valuable. In response to this very valuable information, they told me the game should run fine. Well, splendid, because Minecraft had run perfectly with my glorious cartoon texture pack, surely it could handle TF2.

What I had no idea of, like anyone else, was what the future would bring. This single fucking video game would bring my poor HP to its knees. I could upgrade the poor computer by throwing in a dedicated graphics card, but that would only do so much for this awful APU. Especially in a video game like this, which focuses so heavily on single-threaded performance, I would inevitably have to upgrade the CPU. The means to obtaining those funds? Well, there’s always my uncle.

We got into a match together, they spoke to me like how you would coerce a cat into a kennel when they have to go to the vet, and they KNOW they have to go, and they don’t want to. Except in this particular situation, I didn’t know where I was going. They were also swindling me with treats to get inside, and I fell for it. I fell for it so good. I wanted to get inside that kennel so bad. Dopamine. It hit me hard, I will never forget the first voice line I heard in the game, it was Pyro saying “Mhhhppfff Mhhfpppff!!”

Pyro is my favorite class. Now that might not make sense considering the fact that the generalists are far superior to pyro in most cases. Why wouldn’t I have yearned for Scout, Soldier, Medic, or Demoman? Well, I did. I wanted all of them. Unfortunately, I’m only human, I’m not worth five classes, I’m only worth one. It would be great to have the power of all of the above, but I can’t. Even if I had infinite time, energy, and motivation, I could only choose one class to be my favorite, my main, the class truest to my soul. And that’s what it came down to, “Which class is the truest to my soul?” This time around, it was Pyro, maybe if there’s a rebirth, if I have to live through this again, it’ll be a better class, maybe even Scout. That would have been much better, I would have felt much better about myself, and the people around me would have felt much better, but here we are. In the end, I acted like everyone else; only able to scrap enough money for unusuals on one class, not five or even nine.

I think my personality aligns with Pyro pretty well. I’ve always been obsessed with fire, assuming “always” begins with TF2, for before TF2, there was nothing but empty space. TF2 is akin to the big bang, from nothing there was something, so that’s when true history begins. There’s no “After Death” but merely “Before TF2” and “After TF2.” Such things are simple to apprehend, but what stumps me is when these terms will be introduced into history books and standardized in schools. I think that Pyro would agree with me on this, and if these changes do not come into play, maybe burning down schools would be the best option. Escalate the problem. Step by step. If you can’t get your way, you have to make a way, as they say. I tried sending out emails to my past history teachers and they always responded with some sort of worry, as if what I was saying was “wrong” or if I had gone “mad.” Maybe they were right in a sense, as those are the descriptors people would use to describe Pyro, so I can acknowledge some smudge of truth in them. However, that truth only comes in the fact that a pattern has been recognized, this does not mean Pyro or I are mad, but rather, some association has been made. Correlation does not mean causation.

I haven’t ever told anyone this, but I am sexually attracted to Pyro. I can’t specify man or woman, because there is no certainty in such a thing. I had hoped for years that Valve would release something, let us know, I didn’t care if it would be a man or a woman—I just needed answers, and what did I receive? Nothing. Thanks Valve. Thanks for that. I really appreciated that, and so did everyone else, because I knew I wasn’t the only one in love with Pyro. The difference though, was that Pyro was in love with me also, reciprocated love is the best love, no one likes one-sided love. I was told my whole life that love was supposed to be unconditional, and oh yes, my love for Pyro was most certainly unconditional; probably something akin to what my uncle felt for me.

I fantasized about Pyro as both a man and a woman. Some nights when I’d be masturbating in bed, imagining myself with Pyro, it could be either Pyro as a man or a woman. In either case, I was penetrating them. Asshole or vagina, it didn’t matter, my penis just had to get inside somehow. The latex made it only better. I don’t think I had a thing for latex until Pyro came along, but this changed everything. Now that was all I could think of. Pyro needed to have their suit on. Tight on their skin, oh how it chafed, oh God! What I didn’t expect though, was that switching between male and female Pyro confused my brain. One or the other, that never really made sense, and upon researching the combination of both male and female, I found the term “hermaphrodite.” In this, I began to fantasize Pyro as having both a vagina and penis, and this led to unexpected consequences. Now, instead of me merely always penetrating Pyro, I was being penetrated by Pyro. I didn’t know how to feel about this at first, but since I had grown so comfortable to them, I finally found comfort in it. I began to like it. Oops, Pyro left their flamethrower going, looks like we’re both going to get hot and sweaty with our latex on!

This was all fine and dandy for a while, within the confines of my mind. My mind could go wherever it wanted, no one would have to know what happened in there before, during, or after my release. It was safe in there, but it began to escape. I started looking up pornography of Pyro. I couldn’t help myself. If it exists, there is pornography of it, as the internet says. In most cases, Pyro would be drawn female, but it was fine. Something was better than nothing, I thought. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, but instead of actually learning an art, I was focusing on what actually mattered in the world, playing Team Fortress 2 itself. With the exceptions of school, and fulfilling my emotional needs, it was time to play Team Fortress. Unfortunately, though, I had made a gravely mistake; once. Never again, ostensibly because if it were to happen again, I couldn’t live with myself.

I left the door unlocked and went to bed after spending at least two hours jacking off to Pyro. For whatever reason, maybe God came back to life just this once, or maybe it was the Devil, my mother opened the door. I was sound asleep, of course, so I had no idea of her presence, but the computer screen had not gone to sleep. I don’t understand why, it always would, it would automatically go to sleep when the computer did, after about 30 minutes, but for whatever reason, it did not this time around. The only plausible explanation I could come up with was that the mouse was going back and forth slightly, and the computer was detecting mouse movements when there wasn’t any. Too bad for me. She saw what was on the screen. Pyro, in latex, except for the cleavage. Huge breasts, scarily huge breasts, unrealistically huge, double watermelons. Yeah, she didn’t like that, but I think that’s when she started becoming afraid of me. What was her purpose in coming into my room in the first place? She had wanted to thank me for taking out the trash, as I had become especially reclusive recently, the past few years, and any little thing I did was a surprise to her. I had gone to bed early for the first time in my life, it was about 7:30 PM, so she would’ve expected to see me staring at the screen playing TF2, but no, not this time around. I only found out about this recently, as I was snooping around. She had a journal hidden, which I found while searching the house for spare change so I could buy crate keys. I hate myself.

Back to my first experience; we were in a community server, I had selected Pyro as my first class to play as a suggestion from my friend. Supposedly the “easiest class to play” but I would find that hard to believe later on. We played for a bit; it was a 24-player match on dustbowl. It fine for a first time, on defense we did well until a spy backcapped us, and on offense the same repeated. I felt enjoyment. It was good. It was fun. It had been a while since I last felt something this good. Minecraft had begun to grow stale for me, sure, it may have helped to add in the mods and then learn their intricacies, but it never compares to something new, something fresh. Then it occurred to me, this was the same feeling I had felt when my mother bought me Minecraft and I was able to play on the server with my friends. That’s exactly what it felt like, and it was so good. It was amazing. Some are addicted to speed; others are addicted to TF2. Which one of us is hurting more in the long-run?

After a few weeks of playing with my friends, I was starting to get the hang of it. I understood the basic mechanics, and was getting interested in the more nuanced ones, like rocket and sticky jumping. I had begun researching online guides of the game, and just where I had learned of it, Reddit came to the rescue in informing me in all the ways I didn’t need to be informed, but after sifting through the garbage, I was able to learn the basics. Crouch, jump, and shoot my feet, how hard could it be? Well, I wasn’t used to first person shooters, I never played Call of Duty like the other kids, but something about Team Fortress taught me how to do it so right. It felt so right. It’s akin to a racer explaining how the car is an extension of their body. This was it. I was attached to the game. I was so immersed I genuinely thought I was soldier shooting at my feet. I would go on learning other mechanics as the weeks went by, playing with and without my friends, although school cut into my gaming time, but I put up with it because I didn’t want to deal with my mother. I didn’t deserve her.

Once again, school was out, and summer was in, a cycle that seemingly never ends. Surely it will, succinctly the time spent in that “prison” will be crunched down and tossed out, replaced by valuable information. This valuable information was obvious to all those who had the wisdom and the eyes to see it, and the means to see it, I suppose. Not everyone had a personal computer and internet access, maybe I could have made that my mission in life, rather than spending all my time playing TF2, I could have sacrificed my playing time to make sure everyone had a chance to play. It would be an act of self-sacrifice; I would be a martyr. Yet, this is not that reality, but I’ll take what I can get, and I got something too good. My friends wanted to have something called a “LAN party.” Local area network, so they would say, and I asked what was wrong with having fun over the internet? What difference did it really make? Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, playing online over the internet, and we all saw no issue with it. I knew deep down it would be more fun to see the people I was playing with in real life, so eventually I let them know of my interest.

In two weeks, I’d have to be ready to either buy another computer or bring my desktop. One of my friend’s, or so they were a friend, has semi-wealthy parents, so they have a dedicated room to LAN parties, set up with monitors, keyboards, and mice. There’s only room for eight people, but that posed no issue to us. Obviously, another week, let alone two, with my uncle, was off the table. I just couldn’t do it. I’d have to settle by bringing my desktop, and the plan was that my mom would drive me to their house. In the meantime, I’d have to clean up my computer from its newly FemPyro desktop background, how could I dare to use anything else? I’ll also have to hide away all my porn on my computer so incase someone tries to snoop; they won’t find anything.

In preparation for the party, I decided to practice all the classes. Supposedly the plan is to play 4v4, they called it “fours” but I hadn’t seen that term anywhere online, but perhaps I’m just technologically myopic. I want to be able to present my skills in each and every class, and according to their explanation, I’ll be switching classes on-the-go assuming I don’t play Medic, under which circumstances I would stay the same class. I don’t intend to do that, and I will refuse to do so, to the point of crying. They’ll have to send me home before I play Medic for hours.

In order to practice I generally play with randoms online. I begin playing with Pyro to warm myself up, figuratively and literally. After enough Pyro, at least so that I may make time for other classes, I go one by one playing each class for about one hour. After playing each class, I top it off with one more Pyro match before I close the game, because if I were to disrespect Pyro like that, what kind of person would I be? I do this, day in and day out, until our little party. It actually became exhausting, not because I was getting tired of what I was doing, but the issue resided more-so in the fact that I was not mentally capable of absorbing that much TF2 in such a short time span. Humans were only built for so much. We can build trains, cars, houses, skyscrapers, computers, you name it, but a little too much TF2, and you’re toast, you’re done.

I never thought I’d be one suspectable to such weaknesses, or that I may build a tolerance after some amount of time, but I was totally wrong. Me playing TF2, in my mind, was akin to putting puzzle pieces together, they fit perfectly. Despite this fit, it got tiring, it became so intense I’d have to take a break. Playing more didn’t help, the intensity only grew as I continued playing, until it was so unbearable I’d pass out for a minute or two, with TF2 waiting on my screen, and I’d realize I pushed myself too far and that I had to take a break. I’m yet to meet a human that has a tolerance like me, but if they do, or theirs is better, lucky them, I wish I could play for 13+ hours at a time, but I’m just not capable.

The intensity issue also explains my inability to play Medic. I wouldn’t cry because I was upset to play Medic, but instead because he was actually too intense for me. It’s embarrassing to acknowledge, I know, but it’s true. If I played Medic for more than two hours at a time, I actually did pass out. The experience was genuinely too intense for me to handle, I don’t understand how others were able to handle the task. I would get really into it. I’d forget my surroundings, my needs, my wants, my worries, because in his new world there was nothing to worry about other than keeping my teammates alive. They needed to live, and I had the means to give them life. Yes, like any other class, I’d have a similar level of immersion, forgetting reality and whatnot, but there was a clear difference in the potency of those experiences. Think about it like this: caffeine is a stimulant, a widely used one, and many can tolerate high amounts of caffeine. Caffeine is like playing any of the other eight classes, we can include Pyro for now, but Medic is a whole new class of stimulant. Medic is like taking methamphetamines. Medic ruins you. At first you believe you can handle it, you believe it won’t ruin you, but it will, so you’re better off not touching it at all instead of giving it a chance.

Besides Pyro and Medic, I never dreamt about being with any of the other classes. Sure, with Pyro it was generally sexual, but Medic was another story. Medic was akin to my Minecraft dreams; I thought I was Medic and had to keep my teammates alive. This was another reason I had to avoid playing him too much. It was too intense, and that intensity became an issue when I wanted sleep. Keeping myself alive in a dream was one thing, especially in a silly blocky world. TF2 was different, it was a whole new world of fear and fright, and not only did I have to keep myself alive, I had to keep my teammates alive. It was traumatic. I would see them blow-up, get shot to death, burn to death, and I just couldn’t handle it. Generally, the dream would always end with my own death. The most agonizing death in my experience was being burnt to death, I would desperately search for a health pack, and I would be near it, and a Scout would take the health pack, leading to my demise.

One night, when my mother was sound asleep, I snuck into her room. Under normal circumstances I’d have scruples with this, I had no right to enter her space without permission, but I did it anyway. Whether I wanted to listen or not, I’d inevitably hear her phone conversations, and once she mentioned two key things that would probably change me forever. She told her friend that she was diagnosed with ADHD and that she was taking Adderall for it. At the time I thought she was dumb, which most definitely was not true, but was she playing TF2? No, she wasn’t, and she most definitely could have if she wanted, and because she wasn’t, that meant she probably had an undiagnosed mental illness. The point is, I stole some of her Adderall, and I used it to stay up practicing. An unfair advantage? Maybe, but it meant that I could get more than 12 hours in, I could play from 24-48 hours assuming how many pills I was able to take, but I knew if I took too much she would know. After five days of doing this, she called me out on it, and I was punished severely: I couldn’t go to the LAN party.

I broke down. I wanted to show my friends how far I had come after all my practice. My ability to play TF2 became my worth; and in her actions, I was told I am worth nothing. Sure, she may have not said that directly, but she knew how much I cared about the LAN party. I beamed up to her when I told her about it, and she was happy to see me so happy. I wasn’t expressing much emotion after TF2 entered my life, I had no way of expressing my “new” self. Team Fortress defined who I was, and in a sense, it defined who I would become. To lose the opportunity of a lifetime, to show the people who introduced me to beauty, to love, to life; it hurt too much.

No matter how many tears, nothing changed her mind. Clearly, I had gone too far, stealing her Adderall, and I regret it now. Not only did it take away my LAN party, it also would lead me to yearn for amphetamines. Day after day I would think about that stimulant, I wanted to stay up for days and play Team Fortress, that’s all I wanted, and yet I couldn’t have it. I would find a means to obtaining that… at a later time.

Well, since I was not able to go to the LAN party, I let my friends know, and I just played more TF2. They would question me why, and I had been left to tell them it was because I was sick, because that was the most honest answer I could give. Severely sick, because if I had merely a cold, I most definitely would have been there. In addition, I was playing TF2 during the whole time they had their awesome and fun party, that I couldn’t go to, and I was being questioned as to why I was playing the game if I were so severely sick? Well, my response was quite simply, “It’s to make me feel better.” This was not a total lie either, but instead of trying to heal the made-up sickness, I was trying to help myself heal from the lack of a LAN party. It was working, slowly, but surely.

This became a common theme in my life. When I experienced pain or tribulations, I would turn to Team Fortress. I had no one to turn to, and nothing else to turn to, so it only made sense to choose the thing that loved me. Maybe pre-Minecraft I was able to go to my mother, or later, my little friend group, but those things were both long gone. It was replaced with Minecraft, and then once again, finally, TF2. I hated feeling pain or suffering, which I suppose is like everyone else, but this meant I was constantly on the game. The only time I wasn’t playing was when I was eating, sleeping, or at school. Otherwise, I knew exactly what I needed in order to survive. Otherwise, I would probably lose the will to leave bed. What was I going to get up for? Everything was done for the purpose of playing more TF2. If I had to please my mother with school, so I that I could continue playing, sure, whatever; I couldn’t quite drop-out now anyway.

Something else that was significant in my TF2 lifetime was that through the game, I experienced my first love… with another human being… in the flesh and bone. Okay, I’m telling a half-truth. This person was online, but I had to make due, there was no one else I had in my life that had the same level of feelings with TF2 that I did. My friends liked the game sure, but I knew nothing would work out between us. I met this person in-game, and the Steam alias used was, “HarbingerOfDoom,” but I became to know her as “April.” April was a pretty name, I thought, quite different from her Steam name. April described herself as a girl my age and we talked a lot, and she always seemed to be online, almost never leaving TF2. Based on that mere fact, I was deeply in love.

This went on for about six months, six months too many, six months of damage that I’d have to undo, and some that would never be undone. I believed just about every word she said. We moved quickly from Steam Chat to Skype. This made sense to me, a normal escalation of online friendship, but an oddity of her was that she refused to do any sort of video chat or voice chat, which is something I was craving, and thus I expected to receive either of these in the use of this different application. I never had anything in the flesh and bone, no one was interested in me, male or female. Not that homosexual relationships were accepted at this time, so I was stuck with forming a relationship with the opposite sex. So be it, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, and my fantasies of Pyro could stick to my mind like glue, as if ordered to do so.

April continually would refuse those further interactions that I craved. There were always reasons. “My internet isn’t good enough,” or “I don’t feel comfortable showing my face yet.” I should have known this was a bad sign, but I needed something, I needed some sort of connection with another human being. I would have to settle with someone online, and so be it I thought, but I didn’t think someone would go so far to lie to me. At this point in time, smartphones started becoming a normality; people moved on from the basic cellphone and moved onto the smartphone, whether iPhone or Android, it didn’t matter, it was new and exciting. Unfortunately for me, there was no way I could afford a smartphone, and I wouldn’t expect my mother to be able to afford one, especially considering the fact that I never received anything on my birthday anyway. Although I needed to get my hands on an iPhone, as April claimed she had one, and then we could FaceTime. This thus, led me to inquire my uncle of possible work.

Indeed, we worked hard, and much of that work I am unwilling to describe. I think that many of his fantasies are akin to my fantasies with Pyro, however the difference is that he has been able to live them out in reality, while for myself, it is an impossibility. Some might say one shouldn’t fantasize about the impossible, but you know me, I can’t help myself. After continued giving and taking with my uncle, he then gave me enough money to buy an iPhone. I bought the cheapest model, and then immediately made it known to April. What I did not expect was that she would deny me once again.

I started getting angry, and wanted to know why she wouldn’t show her face, and I wanted to know why her microphone quality was always so bad. I spent what little money I had to buy her unusuals for her favorite class, Soldier, and she was thankful, but only in text. Why was this the case? I just needed to know, and I said that I wouldn’t ever buy her anything again if I wasn’t told the reasons. The real reasons, not simply because of internet or comfortability. Far greater than my surprise to her continual denial of connection, she turned out to be he. This was not April, but instead, Joseph. I found this out in a Skype call. Joseph told me that April was a fabrication, laughed at me with the voice changer off, and then ended the call. He then proceeded to block me on Skype, on Steam, and then mock me on my Steam profile for being an idiot and a loser.

Basically, I have never been so distraught in my life. The only thing I could do was play Team Fortress 2. I lost interest in eating, drinking, showering, or functioning at all. My mom tried to force me to go to school, but eventually gave up. I was 16, and we mutually agreed I would not be able to continue high school, so I dropped out. All I did was play TF2. Pyro was my focus, but I tried expanding into other classes, because when you do something for 18 hours a day, it only makes sense for you to start getting tired of the same-old things. No, of course I didn’t get tired of playing Team Fortress, but I had to keep things fresh. There was nothing else in my life after all, and quite literally, there would be nothing else. This game meant everything to me, and I spent all my time on it.

Being a skill-less 16-year-old, who couldn’t even complete high school, I had to find some way of making money. After doing some searches, I found out about trading. I always knew about trading in TF2, but I only did it to give a friend a weapon or two. What I did not know was that people were actually making money with trading, so I did what I considered the best option for myself: I started trading. Obviously, I would continue playing TF2 all day, but only for 12 hours, for the other 6, I would be trading. I spent so much time in trade servers, spamming my binds, trying to get any good offers, sending out offers, and on and on. After a few months, I started to make some keys, and then those keys became even more keys, and I started making actual money, although it was all in TF2 items. I would keep this going for as long as possible, and it’s not like I had to pay for anything. My mom didn’t ask for rent yet, nor did she ask for anything. In fact, I think she was afraid of me, fully afraid of me. Despite being anorexic, smelly, and retarded, she was fearful of my physical actions; as if I weren’t predictable in my continued playing of TF2.

I continued trading and playing TF2, but I felt a hole in my heart; a need for something more. In that moment, I was reminded of my mother’s Adderall. The things I would do for some more of that. I had been in talks with a lot of people online, and I inevitably talked with a large variety of TF2 players. Some had connections with competitive players, which I didn’t really have any interest in, but I was made aware of some means of obtaining substances via one trader. Basically, he told me it was normal for competitive players to use stimulants, and the player he mentioned was Habib, a new up-and-coming competitive Demoman. After poking and prying some, he told me to download Tor, how to install a VPN, and what Bitcoin was. After I was initiated, I gave him some keys, and then he gave me Bitcoin, and a link, which was unlike any link I had seen before, and was told to use it in the Tor browser. I did as he asked, and it gave me a login screen. I created an account for the site, and was presented with a wide variety of drugs, and I found that stimulants were prevalent on the site, so I bought a pipe and meth.

It came in the mail, and my mother was skeptical, but she wouldn’t dare question me beyond the simplest things like, “What is it?” I didn’t tell her anything more than it was computer parts. She might’ve wanted to question how I got the money, but after she found out my uncle picked me from not so long ago, which is how I bought an iPhone, she had probably theorized a few ways in which I might have made a quick buck. I really didn’t know what I was doing, I don’t even know how much I bought, I just knew I sent over a lot of keys, honestly, I think even some unusuals, and I got a lot of Bitcoin in return. Although I finally figured out how to use the pipe, and I started getting high, and this, well, only enabled me to get better at TF2. At the beginning, I would only stay up for two days straight, max, and with that I would play the game itself for about 24 hours, and trade for 10, and the rest of the time I’d be a bit brainless, unable to really do anything because I was fatigued out from TF2, temporarily.

This went on basically the same for a while. My mother stopped caring, she had basically given up on me at this point, and I would go on and on fragging and trading. Trading so I could get my substances, and also make some money on the side, but not to forget the awesome cosmetics I was getting for all of my classes. Some of my friends on Steam started to question me on how often I was playing TF2. I mean, 36 hours per two days? I think that’s a lot of gaming for one person to be doing consistently. Well, the excuse I would give them was always something along the lines of, “Oh, I’m just afking!” Of course, I was not, I was fragging, I was destroying all those who came before me, swiftly and easily. Something I began to notice after enough of this though, was that, I began to feel the need to hit the pipe more often. The high wasn’t enough at the same dose, and I had to increase the dosage, and this was consistently happening. It was all made up in my head, because it was simply because when I wasn’t getting my high, I felt terrible, so I had to do something to get back to my baseline of functioning; of which was playing TF2. The unexpected consequence of this was that I never really got enough sleep to recover, and I went into something along the lines of psychosis, or some line of delusion, and it was quite dangerous to be around me.

During this psychosis, I saw many of the TF2 characters in my room, talking to me, giving me advice, and then I noticed something in particular that was most unusual. Every class had talked to me aside from one, Pyro, and this made quite upset. If I were to see all the classes while in this state, I most definitely wanted to see Pyro. Well, eventually, my wish was granted, and I saw Pyro, as if I had the Fempyro mod installed with my vision. Well, it was a sight to see, and I wouldn’t be able to describe the events that occurred, but you should understand that, this was essentially a replication of many of the dreams I had not so long ago.

This went on for even more time, but I reached a breaking point where I wasn’t trading enough to make enough keys so that I could buy my tools for God’s work. I then had my comedown, and slept for a long time, I don’t even know how long, and consistently did that. Sure, every waking moment was still dedicated to TF2, but that was only maybe, I don’t know, 8 hours a day? Not very much in comparison to what I was doing before. However, after a few weeks, I was recovering pretty quickly, and I started trading a lot more again, so I could build up my backpack again. This, well, took months, but after some time, I was about where I had begun this journey, although I was a much more experienced TF2 player. I could easily pub-stomp, so I was playing around with many different weapon combinations just to ensure I could destroy the enemy no matter the circumstance. At this time, the main screen for the game started asking about “voting.” You could vote for either Pyro or Heavy, and whichever one you chose, would receive an update first. I obviously instantly voted for Pyro, because if I didn’t, what kind of boyfriend would I be?

I don’t even know how long the voting went on for, but eventually, and thankfully, Pyro won the vote, and would be getting an update first. Something I found odd though, was that, the text was changed on the website. Before, it said one class would get an update first, but now it said only one class would get an update, which meant Heavy wouldn’t get anything, which quite honestly, was pretty upsetting. It’s a fun class, trust me, all of them are, but it was a shame to see Heavy neglected like that. I don’t know what the developers at Valve were thinking. In the meantime, everyone was getting hyped for the update, and I was too. I was stocking up crate keys so that when the update dropped, and inevitably came out with a new create or two, I’d be able to unbox right away. What I didn’t see coming was the disaster that would be Meet your Match.

Okay, the events are misremembered in my head. You have to understand, that in the events that are going to be described to you, I then received brain damage, and this along with whatever damage caused by my drug use has caused undeniable and irreversible damage to my thinking apparatus. The point is, Meet your Match ruined my fucking life. TF2, in some ways, I would say has ruined my life, but quite honestly, everything would have been fine if Meet your Match never came out. That update actually pushed me over the edge; it stopped me from being able to function. It ended everything that was good in the world. It ended me, and it ensured that I would never have a future.

The Meet your Match came out, and basically, it was the worst thing that could have happened to the game. Casual mode and Competitive mode were barely functional, the queue for both was literally ripped from Man vs. Machine, and you would always have to requeue after the match ended. The matches were unbalanced, the XP was meaningless, and it quite honestly hurt the game in more ways than I’ve hurt myself. Despite this, I really tried playing, but it was terrible. I couldn’t find a match sometimes, the community servers I used to play on that you could find in quickplay were now dead, and I was always locked in to one side. I couldn’t switch teams; it just felt like I had control taken away from me. I’ve never had any control over my life, and this only made it worse. There never has been any choice for me, and the Meet your Match update ensured this was drilled into my head.

Like many others, I started selling my backpack. I wanted to acquire all the funds possible for my next course of action. This is what you might call retribution. I sold all of my unusuals. All of my hats. All of my weapons. All of my keys. I sold everything for money, got paid through PayPal, and then bought a ticket to Seattle, WA. I was going to give the Valve HQ a visit, and let them know how badly they’ve messed up. I bought a plane ticket online, and I realized I had no identification, so that wasn’t really going to work. Instead, I found a bus I could take to Washington, it would take a few days, but I would get there nonetheless. My mother did not inquire at all, in fact, she didn’t even notice I left until she got a call much later on. Anyway, I began my trip to the Valve HQ to show Valve how badly they had ruined my life, and I’m very certain, many other lives.

There were no checks for drugs on the bus, so I brought all my tools with me. We would have stops, so during those periods of time, I would get high. I didn’t sleep the entire way there, not only because of the drugs, but because my mind was racing, and I was furious; I had never been filled with so much anger in my entire life. Eventually, we made it there, and my mind was essentially broken already, but I used Google Maps to find the Valve HQ, despite being delusional. I had trouble conceptualizing what was real and fake, but no matter what, I knew I had a job to do. Eventually, I walked there, I don’t know how long it took, really, these memories are a blur, but I made it to the HQ itself. I saw Pyro there, I imagine I was already in a state of psychosis, but I didn’t consider Pyro a part of my delusion; instead, I saw Pyro as an extension of myself; doing what I knew had to be done, and we would work together to do it. In my bag, I had gasoline and matches, and so I began to get to work with Pyro.

I got the small amount of gasoline out of my bag, poured it all over the entrance to the building, and threw a match. It was on fire, alright. However, what I did not know, what that I was being watched the entire time. I guess someone had called the police already, I don’t know if it was a camera or a person or both or something else, but it happened, and firefighters were there right away too. There was only a fire for maybe, I don’t know, a full minute before it was totally extinguished. However, within that minute, the police were there, and in response to seeing them, I started running at them, yelling and screaming. I was saying something about the Meet your Match update, how they should be on my side, but since I was running at the officers, they pulled their guns out on me, and one fired right into my chest, and because of the speed I was running at, I hit the ground hard. This then caused brain damage, and with the rapid blood loss, I was quickly losing consciousness, until finally waking up in the hospital bed. Upon awakening, I saw my mother talking with two detectives. It was hard to hear what they were saying, but I heard my mother say something about “Team Fortress 2” and “He loves that game.” The officers responded with something along the lines of, “Yes, we know, and we predict to hear something about the Meet your Match update, which ruined the game.”

I don’t know if these things were actually said; once again, I was totally out of my mind, and I haven’t really been in my mind since then. However, I didn’t receive jail-time, apparently there was some loop-hole in the law. I didn’t quite understand it, but it was something relating to Team Fortress 2 and mental illness. I don’t see the association, but my state appointed lawyer saved my ass, and I was able to return home relatively quickly; perhaps in only a few weeks.

Now in the modern day, I mean, this only happened a few months ago. After these events, my connection with my mother was only damaged further. She refused to speak with me, and basically wanted to disown me. I’m 17 currently, so she can’t kick me out, but I know that is her plan. However, she won’t have to do this. I have given up entirely. I no longer have Team Fortress 2. I can’t play the game anymore. It is worthless. It gave me everything, but simultaneously, took away everything. With what little money I still had in my PayPal wallet, I bought more Bitcoin, and now I’m going to buy fentanyl and end my life with an overdose. I’ve had enough. The peak of my life is over; I got to see Pyro more than once, and even if it was only in a psychotic episode, I was able to lose my virginity. I have experienced all life has to offer, and so, I shall give up living. Hopefully in this, my mother will no longer have to stress over my existence, and despite never seeing my father, I hope, he too, will be able to forget that I was ever born. If there is a rebirth, I expect to be Scout main.