Tetris.

This might be a weird one to follow up with, but I’ve been playing a lot of Tetris lately. And I know I’m super late with it, like decades late, and I know, maybe, we’ve moved past it already, but there’s something about how simple it is that brings me back to it again and again. I’m playing it on my Nintendo Switch, a device that can run much more complicated, flashy games (which I like), but I think sometimes in the busyness of school, of spring, of being in my late twenties and wondering what is actually going on and will this same thing be going on in the future (the good parts, fingers crossed, yes), I just want to play a simple game. I just want the blocks to fall and for them to somehow, miraculously, land in the right places. I want the obstacles to disappear in an instant, to have that feel good feeling of everything working out just in time. And I don’t know if it’s all versions of Tetris, but the one I have seems to sometimes give you the blocks you’re missing, which I find immensely comforting: for what seems random to fit perfectly, for you to just need to figure out how to rotate things, how to shift them around, all the while knowing that everything can fit. And yeah it starts to speed up and it becomes impossible to fit everything, to rotate in time, to move fast enough, but even this is somewhat of a comfort: the acknowledgment that sometimes it is humanly impossible to get the obstacles out of the way, to line things up in time; sometimes, your blocks rise all the way to the top, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can only do the best you can. You can only close out the game or play it one more time, hoping—maybe this time—you’ll get a little further than you did before.

Image: playSTUDIOS