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. You roll a die to determine how many tiles you move. Will you go towards the forest or the mountains?
Each tile you land on you pick up the corresponding card. Keep the cards in the order you get them.
You can investigate the Hill of Salt. Be careful your pet companion doesn't run off!
At the Gas Station you can talk to an attendant, who will tell you which is the quickest route, or about mysteries along the long way.
You can visit the fabled Walled Garden. At the entrance a voice says, "Who goes there?"
The tunnels under the Great Mountains are the fastest way home. But there are surprises in the dark.
The Oracle in the Desert may or may not give good advice.
If you dare to look at your reflection in the Mirror Lake uncomfortable truths will be revealed.
When you reach the Shore you can leave the game entirely and live out your dream of being a lighthouse keeper.
‘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
