At Post Lobby, Friday night: Female, Blonde.

Turn the items off. Raise the stock to five. The only time I’ve ever touched you is with a tap of the B button, though I have to remind myself that on that screen is not you, that there, standing next to what is not you, is not me. They are pixels in our likenesses, or what we would like our likenesses to be. Sometimes I play innocent and naïve, a baseball cap on my head and a yo-yo in my hand. Other times I pull up on a motorcycle, crude and tasteless, to see if that’s what you’re into. You never know who I’ll appear as next; still searching for who I am to you. Show me what you see when you turn your head to the left and look at me. I look at your torn jeans and tattoos and wonder what it is that makes you don that same pink dress, that same crown night after night. We leap from building to building, across chasms. We dodge fast cars and laser beams. We grab each other by the shoulders and throw, tangling ourselves up with every toss. I watch the percentage by your name at the bottom of the screen rise, and I dread the fifth time you disappear from the screen, the match over too soon, for these are the only ways I know to bring you close: a dance of wave dashing, of double jumping, of ledge guarding. Tonight I played moustache to your matriarch, lost to you for the first time, a role unfamiliar to me, but worth it to see you suppress a smile. I would give you flowers if we hadn’t prevented their falling from the sky. I would give you my heart in a container. When the game is off, I try not to imagine myself running across a two-dimensional platform towards you, but I can see you bring your shield up, can feel my fist connect with it. The phantom pains when I finally set down the controller. Someday I will leap over rocks and ferns and pick all the mushrooms I find. I will enter your dorm room with its magma colored carpet. I will hope your roommate does not tell me that you are in another place, somewhere else, but I will play on, through all the worlds it takes to get to you.