It's not Monday, but I felt this post was necessary. Necessary for me to feel better.
One of my most-used "toys" as a child was my coral pink Nintendo DS Lite. Ahhhh throwback to 2006, right? I had that puppy since I was about 11 years old. I remember excitedly going to GameStop after saving for weeks (my weekly salary was a whopping $3) and proudly telling the the associate at the counter that I wanted the pink DS Lite behind her. I felt loaded with cash and on top of the world. Well, the cash was gone pretty fast, but that on top of the world feeling didn't leave so fast.
I brought it home and set up my PictoChat name and message. I clicked in my first game, Animal Crossing: Wild World, and began my new virtual life. That game would be played for a couple hours per day, every day, for about 3 years straight. The virtual life was my life.
By the way, if you're an Animal Crossing fan, I caught every fish, insect, and fossil. I also had millions of Bells and the most expensive furniture and Gracie clothes and...you get the idea. I had it all, as I should if I spent almost every waking hour with the game. Okay, bragging over.
My DS Lite went everywhere. To gymnastics meets. To gym sleepovers. To normal sleepovers. To the doctor's office. To the 6 hour car trips. My friends usually had one too, and we would all giddily send weird drawings and one-word handwritten messages to each other over PictoChat. At one sleepover, we were supposed to be sleeping, but really we were all under our sleeping bags communicating with our DS Lites. Little did we know that the bright lights were not completely blocked out by our cheap sleeping bags, as we soon realized as my friend's parents walked in and confiscated them all from us and firmly ordered us to sleep "for real". We were all experiencing that crappy feeling you get after getting in trouble, but it was so much fun thinking we were so badass for communicating with our little gaming devices.
My brother also had a DS Lite, so you can imagine how much we played together. We would even talk over PictoChat after we were tucked in at night. Our code was for one of us to cough really loudly so that the other could hear it through the walls between our rooms, and we would both turn on our DS Lites and send messages and bad drawings to each other. I don't even know what we talked about. It doesn't matter though, because those risky times were the best.
Well a couple of years went by, and eventually the DS had to be set aside with the incoming homework torpedo that accompanied high school. It sat quietly in the top drawer in my closet. Just waiting patiently to be played with again. My Animal Crossing town was probably overflowing with weeds.
Then, one day a few months ago, I opened the drawer. I got my DS out just for kicks, just to selfishly relive my childhood a little. I felt almost nothing. None of that joy and anticipation I had for years every time I eagerly slid the power button upwards. I only smiled a little, thinking about those glory days, but that was about it.
So the only logical solution to me was to sell it. Because I wasn't using it, right? I mean, it had been sitting in a drawer untouched for years. Also, I'm 18 years old, going to college, I was probably never going to play any games on it again, and I might as well make some cash on it.
So yesterday I got the DS Lite ready to sell. I erased my PictoChat name and custom settings. I spent a painful 20 minutes hovering over the "Erase Town Data" button on Animal Crossing, but eventually did it. I put everything it its original box and headed off to GameStop. I knew exactly what I was doing. I was feeling a little sad about selling it, but I kept telling myself I didn't need it. I didn't use it. It didn't matter.
I dumped everything out on the GameStop counter and the associate tiredly tested everything. He fumbled around with it, trying to find the power button. "It's on the right side, and you need to slide it upwards," I quickly said, as I realized how much I knew that console inside and out. It was taking quite a while for him to check it all, and with every passing second, I began to feel worse and worse. Another customer walked in asking for help, and I stepped aside for a second. I took an absent-minded glance at the counter with my DS and games strewn all over it, and suddenly it hit me: that was really my childhood on my counter. All the memories and emotions flooded back to me in that moment, and my heart wanted to passionately yell "NEVER MIND I DON'T WANT TO SELL THESE" and run out and play some Animal Crossing. But I realized how pathetic it would look for me to say I wanted them back, so I bit my lip. I felt so weak. I felt so powerless. I felt like I was in the process of losing some of my life, and it was too late to turn back now. The associate handed me the relatively small amount of cash, and I walked out. Feeling horrible.
I still don't feel that great. Really, I shouldn't feel so sad about selling an obsolete gaming system and games. But that's not what they were. They were years and years of fun. Of laughter and good times. They were essentially a few precious years of my childhood disguised as kid's games and an old device. And I sold that.
Here's the moral of the story: don't sell anything that played a major positive role in your childhood for any amount of money or any reason. No matter how much you need cash, no matter how little you use it. Your heart is always going to tell you to not do it, and don't let your mental discipline tell you otherwise, because your mental discipline is really untrustworthy sometimes. Nostalgia is truly a matter of the heart, and it deserves to be carefully listened to.
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