Tetris: N-Blox

I'm in early high school. Likely 2005. I have no friends and I come home to a household full of arguing. When it isn't my parents, it's them and my stepsiblings getting into it. I hide in my bedroom and I eat chips and salsa and play N-Blox on a website for hours at a time, doing all I can to avoid detection from the others in the house. A knock off game for a knock off person.

It's almost essentially Tetris, and it's as simple as I can handle at the time, given my rapidly deteriorating mental state. I am on multiple heavy sedative medications and in therapy three times a week. All I have the energy for is staring at a screen and moving multi-colored differently shaped blocks around while I eat only one thing for days on end. N-Blox, or Tetris, really encapsulates the way I currently feel. Continually trying to endure, only to be trapped in a never ending repeating cycle of inescapable madness. No end in sight. Therapy. Medication. Therapy. Medication. Abusive family. Abusive family. Abusive family. Doesn't matter how many blocks I move, it never ends, it always stays the same.

The game speeds up, representative of my anxiety levels. Never a moments peace. Never a second to be calm. To feel safe. To have any control. Always dodging everything I can to not have it all crumble in on me at any given moment. I go to therapy, I come home, and I go right back to N-Blox. It's a never ending cycle of the same attempt to escape repetitive evil.

After long, awful days at school, failing every class and being bullied into the dirt, I come home and I play N-Blox. Despite being a somewhat accurate depiction of what I'm currently living through - in terms of things always falling on top of me at an ever increasing rate while I can't escape the inevitable failure of escape - there's one thing that makes the game more appealing, and that's that at least in N-Blox...I have some modicum of control. I control where the pieces fall. I control where they go. How they land. I have no control in my life. I am forced on multiple medications to keep the voice that tells me to kill myself at bay, and no control in stopping my stepsisters constant sexual abuse, but in this game...in this game, I have just the smallest amount of control, and psychologically that makes all the difference in the world. This false sense of control allows me to keep going, even though I don't want to.

N-Blox becomes escapism in the grandest sense of the concept. A way to blur out the evil that surrounded me, the voices outside my room that screamed about me and the voice in my head that screamed about me. With N-Blox, focus was absolute, and that allowed me the ability to ignore everything else. Nothing mattered but the blocks on the screen, and figuring out how to keep the game going for as long as possible. That's all it is anyway. That's all life has turned out to be. A game. A horrible game you have to keep enduring, no matter how painful it is, because to lose somehow might upset others, even if it's what's best for you. You have to keep reaching the next level. More medication. Different medication. A new, worse therapist who cares even less than the previous. Another line of blocks to break down. What's the goddamn point. It's all just pixels. The eventual game over screen allows me to sigh a breath of a relief. Finally, a release from the torment of continuing simply because it's expected of me. If only life could be the same.

I was sick then. I am sick now. I no longer play N-Blox or even Tetris. I've given up any hope of control because I've been proven the attempt is hopeless in and of itself. Now the illness is me. The game is rigged against my favor.

And no matter how hard I try, or how long I try for, I can never escape the inevitable end screen. It's coming. I have no choice but to embrace it. Just a sick young lady in a house with terrible people hurting her every which way to Sunday. Not able to get actual help. Pushed on things they think help instead of asking or listening. My issues shuffled off onto some "professional" instead of the parents who were supposed to love me and want me. That end screen is so alluring. In N-Blox, when asked if I wanted to try again, I'd always select "Yes". But in life...in life the answer is so easily a resounding "NO." I don't want to keep going. I don't want to try again. I just want the game to be over. I've tried to lose so many times and failed even at that. At least in N-Blox if you lose, you get whatever score you ended with. In life, what's the loss get you? Nothing. It's just over. So really what's the use of trying.

N-Blox gives me a brief, momentary respite from the never ending constant abuse that invades my room and my brain on a daily basis. But even it isn't enough. After all, it's just Tetris.

And only someone truly deeply sick and crazy would think anything like Tetris would have any bearing of signifigance on their actual life.