Minecraft and Me

I have constructed great mansions and cities. I have swum across vast oceans. I have climbed the tallest of peaks. And I have accidentally spawned a chicken into an underground waterfall, which in turn, horridly washed it into a magma chamber where I surprisingly procured some cooked chicken from its invisible corpse. 

This severely scarred me, for I am all about animal rights and I am a strict vegetarian, even in Minecraft.

Since 7th grade, Minecraft has been an integral function in the large, strange, internal series of mechanisms that keep me sane. It is a way to let off steam while additionally allowing my imagination to run wild in an infinite world filled with infinite possibilities. Sometimes, I heavily rely on the game to almost literally transport me into another world, one where I can cover the sky with a rainbow-like assortment of wool or lurk in the deep mine shafts that twist and tangle below the surface of the block-like trees. Other times, the app peacefully chills on my phone's second screen, sometimes months on end, waiting for me with an ever-present patience and thirst for my reentrance into our shared worlds once more. 

Yet even after those extended droughts or the few times when I had became so undeniably upset by accidentally deleting one of my personalized, homey worlds, I have routinely come back to the app. When I imagine a life where Minecraft does not accompany me as an integral part of my being, I feel strange, for so much of who I am has blossomed from the app. Yet, in the end, I create anew. I mine. I craft.

       - J. A. Kind