Diary of a Gaming Addict’s Wife
It’s 2019 and one of the things I wrote to better care for my body is to sleep at 11pm, max 12. My immunity suffers every time I incur sleep debt and almost always, I will definitely catch the famous flu. Nothing fatal for sure but nonetheless an insufferable menace.
My husband was clicking away on his laptop when I asked if I could turn off the lights. He instantly conceded and in a moment the room was dark. Not quite.
I plunged my head to my thin pillow as I hoped to make good of my aspirations. Focus on the rituals, not results. Yes. I will do just that. I hugged the other pillow on my left as I tried to make my way to dreamland. Not. Too. Fast.
First it was the lumination coming from the laptop. No not just light. It flickered constantly like in a dance floor except this time it was bright white. Lying on the left side, I pulled half the pillow over my head and labored to ignore the flickering light in the darkness of our room. Then it was the incessant clicking of the mouse like a mad person channeling anger by driving the axe through a piece of wood. It was absolutely maddening, even as I pushed my finger inside my ear to mute it. All trips to sleep city tonight were canceled. I lay there fully awake reflecting on my sleep plans and situation and resigned to the idea that the person I married is enslaved to his games like a boy who never really grew up and remained chained to his toys. I was not going to fall asleep. Not in these conditions. Accepting that I was going to fail, I got up, opened the light and hoped to find refuge in a fictional world Hemingway created, wishing I would forget how upset I was of his gaming addiction, his passive indifference to the person on the other side of the bed. When I first met this person, it was unknown to me the extent of his addiction. I seemed to have this preconception on my mind that only teenage boys succumbed to this sort of fixation, definitely not adult men halfway through their 30s. I thought that at some point in the adulting stage, it would go away as with the pesky embarrassing breakouts. It was too late when I realized his chronic habit, two month’s shy before our wedding. I used to say that I would never marry a gamer because even before then I knew my life will be a wrecking hell. I knew I couldn’t live with such. I saw my friends in college who knowingly went full self-destruct mode just so for the passing pleasure of another Dota match. It was painful and sobering and a warning to witness them waste their life away inside computer shops yelling invectives to each other.
One cannot say that I have not attempted to understand his world. I did. I read about a Pakistani boy Sumail who got so big in e-gaming that he made it to a feature in Bloomberg magazine years back. I watched late night TI (The International) tournaments just so I could show some semblance of support but that too was short-lived. I just couldn’t stomach it. To me, it is stupid and a complete waste of time. It was futile to pretend that I liked anything. At some point into our young marriage, with much frustration and grief, I came to accept that I could not change my husband and if I wished to be free from my daily disappointments, I ought to cease expecting he would honor his promise before our wedding that he won’t play anymore. The clock struck 12 and he was moving the laptop and the makeshift bed table from the bed to the floor. He had already set up his four accounts to continuously “play” while he dozed off. What utter nonsense! Complete rubbish! What idiocy! Since I was an unhappy wife last night (and many other nights), I kept on reading, faking an interest on Hemingway so that he could not turn the lights off just yet. In my infantile self, I was trying to get even and I knew I kind of succeeded when he appeared restless, shifting from time to time. And he was not snoring. I knew when he is truly asleep because he always snores. I was also aware that I was being an idiot, a laughable idiot at that for engaging in such hopeless mischief. By 12:30 I had already convinced myself that he suffered an inconvenience, although not as much as I did, but enough to make the point tonight. I stood up and switched off the lights and cut back my already mounting sleep debt.
