A wish come true, but not quite (in possibly the worst way it could happen)
I hadn’t come out of the house for almost a week, I live alone, I had people looking after me from my phone, ignored them out for, reasons.
I ordered delivery food online, the dirty plates are mounting, the dining table is full of trash, the laundry is piling up, I hadn’t taken any shower for half of that time, and all I do is play laptop all day. My latest fixation being tinkering with Windows XP on a virtual box and software from the same era, listening to music that matches the vibe from a similar time, websites that had designs replicating popular sites of the old. Old Youtube, old Geocities, old forums, old everything. When I’m not doing those things, I play an open-world game called Subnautica.
I tried really, really hard to escape reality. My parents had transferred my monthly allowance, so I’m free to do whatever I want. Well, except cutting off contact from them, I couldn’t… I couldn’t.
Ever since I was around 6 years old, the age when I was exposed to a computer for the first time, I had been envisioning an image. A utopic little vision about a room of my very own, with a lot of CRT monitors stacking up to a brim, that it almost touches the roof. My time with computers at the time was few and far in between, but I knew I was going to fall in love really, really hard for this piece of technological marvel.
I believe the vision came from the first transformer movie, the scene where the hacker nerd that shouts “SHUT UP GRANDMA!” shows his room with computers. Granted, it doesn’t have stacking CRTs to the brim, but he is a competent hacker narratively-speaking. Well, not competent enough to evade the FBI, I guess. But you get the picture, I had a little inkling in my heart to be something like that starting around that time.
I believe there were also other western movies, media, shows that my mum watched throughout the 2008-2011 that set in the early 2000s, that inspired me, and planted the vision, that sort of thought within me. My mum is a big fan of crime-solving dramas, so there were bound to be plenty of scenes depicting a hacker who is also a hoarder.
You see where am I going now? For the worse.
There was an anime wallpaper engine from back in the day, depicting a digital sound composer’s computer battle station with a large widescreen monitor in the front and center, and Hatsune Miku is teleporting around that dark apartment room filled with garbage bags and litters all around the floor. And I remember, briefly telling everybody I know about it, that I want to live in that apartment. They look at me weirdly, asking back “With all that garbage?” Of course, I didn’t mean with the garbage, I was talking about the vibe, but that wasn’t a thing yet so sooner or later I stopped talking about it and bury it in my thoughts.
I wrote about this before, and I was sure it was the vibe that I was referring to. And not the bags of trash and litters around the house, which has aged badly, because now I’ve been experiencing that exact room. But without the cool battlestation, without the cute anime girl teleporting around the room, just a heavy weight in my thoughts that I tried escaping from, that will inevitably catches on to me.
30-Aug-24