Month 7 — The Game of Life
This is my version of ‘The Game of Life’. It is very simple, yet is different every time you play.
You moved to the city in your youth. You worked, you dined, you dated, you advanced in your job. One day it hits you: Where did the time go? Why does nothing feel like Home? You remember a red-roofed house overlooking the sea. Grab your pet, gas up the car and go.
This game is for one person. Your only goal is to go Home.
Your goal is simple—to go Home.
At each turn pick up the card that corresponds to the tile you land on. Keep the cards in order.
Will you visit the Mountains, or the Forest?
Investigate the Hill of Salt. Watch out for your pet, make sure it doesn't dash off.
At every intersection you can choose any path or even backtrack.
The tunnels under the Great Mountain are the quickest way home. But there are surprises in the dark.
You can visit the fabled Walled Garden. At the entrance a voice says, "Who's there?"
Ask for directions at the Gas Station. Will you go the quickest route or take the long road through the Desert?
Get mysterious advice from the Lion of the Desert.
If you dare to look at your reflection in the Mirror Lake you will learn something about yourself. Whether it is good or bad, who is to say.
You can leave the game entirely and live out your dream of being a lighthouse keeper.
Month 7—The Game of Life
Do you remember “The Game of Life”? Where the amount of money, houses, and babies determines whether you win? This is my Game of Life. Your only goal is to reach Home.
To move forward you roll a die. At any intersection you can take any route you want. Will you choose the route from the city that goes through the Mountains or the one through the Forest? The Desert or the Shore? Will you take the quickest way? Will you tarry? You can even go backwards.
Each tile you land on corresponds to a card with a snippet of text on it. As you travel you gather cards. The game ends when you reach the red-roofed house, where you can rest, put together the cards that tell you the poem of your life, and be buried in the hill overlooking the sea.
Every time you play you will have a different poem at the end. The only thing that remains the same is your final breath at the end of your journey.
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‘Home’ for me is a complicated concept. One of my epileptic auras is called jamais vu, where you are in a familiar location or with a familiar person but you can’t shake the feeling that you don’t know where you are or who you are with. I only learned the cause of these feelings in the summer of 2024, so for all my life I simply got knocked over by a tidal wave of yearning once in a while, a yearning to go Home.
I did not know where Home was, or what it was. My best guess was a place from before I was born, a place where I would finally, with great relief, return to upon my death. Not heaven, some other real place. With real people and real grass under my feet. With age I came to see the universe as that ‘real place’, as Home, and the human condition as a blip of experience, perhaps of the universe looking at itself. Maybe. It didn’t matter. One day I would go Home.
I suspect it is not just temporal lobe epileptics who get caught up in this wave of yearning—where everything is unfamiliar, grayed out, cold and unenfolding. I suspect all of us from the time we exit childhood occasionally yearn for home. And even now, understanding my experience of jamais vu, I firmly believe one day I will go Home.
Materials: air-dry terracotta clay, soil, sand, paper, live flowers, makeup compact mirror, salt