Golden Shovel Sheltered-In-Place with Animal Crossing Log-Out Text and OCD

“Ready to wrap things up for now?” -Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Despite the plans you’ve tended like infants, for this, you aren’t ready.

Without the evergreen prey of the weekday, your brain turns instead to

-wards its owner, sick gentleweapon that it is. You spend weeks wilting: wrap

yourself corpselike in a gurgle of grey sweats, refuse the [    ] prophecy of Things

Going Back To Normal Soon. You know your country. So you give up

on the god-given dawn, turn your console on, and do the american thing: for

-get. Bewitched by pixels, you stink of lonely, but Nintendo don’t mind. Now

this is a life worth the precise affections of your eye. Doubled onscreen, you ready

your automated elysium for no one’s visit, chat with handfuls of code designed to

love you back. Every lily is accounted for, every gift assigned correctly to its wrap.

It’s months before diagnosis. You feed the greedy groundhog in your head the things

it demands, tunnel into giddy digital until every window inside of you fogs up.

You not playing. You need this routine. Still, you act like the pastel tasks aren’t longed for

in a silly effort to save face. When Tom Nook calls for you, you fondly fume: What now?