personal cosmology
home planet
“Quick, while she’s pouting,” my friend said to me. It was New Year’s Day and we were attempting to run an errand without the 6-year-old child coming along. We made it out the front door and most of the way to the car.
The front door opened a crack, and there she was, actually distraught, her face tear-stained and grimacing.
We turned back, met her at the door.
“I don’t want to go to the store,” she pleaded, “I just want you,” and she buried her face in the billowing folds of her mother’s blouse.
“Oh man,” I said involuntarily.
We were utterly defenseless against this countermove. “Get your shoes on,” the child’s mother told her. The child reappeared at the door fully dressed and fully recovered. She had a slight skip in her step as she walked alongside me to the vehicle.
“Sorry,” my friend said from behind us.
“No way,” I said. I looked down at the scamp next to me. “We’re gonna look at the toy aisle.” She and I exchanged a knowing look, and she grinned up at me. Then I muttered something to myself about the child knowing this would be the case for me, anyway, which was why she’d wanted to come with in the first place. The child happily strapped herself into her car seat.
As we arrived at our destination, I finally glanced down at my gen 2 Original Tamagotchi, which was dangling from my purse.
“Oh my God,” I said.
I’d already anticipated that particular day would be my Tamagotchi’s death day—my Tongaritchi had evolved into a horrid little Takotchi, fated for a sad, short existence—but I’d expected to see a headstone where my Takotchi had been. Rather than anything so morbid, there was instead a crude pixel drawing of a UFO flying off into the stars, which I had not expected.
“Oh, my God,” I said again. “My Tamagotchi died and… returned to its home planet? Look at this, my Tamagotchi is a Scientologist, it went home to Xenu.” We laughed. Then my Tamagotchi fell off my purse and skittered a few feet into the parking lot.
“Ah-whoops,” I said. “Glad I just put this thing on.” That morning I’d put my Tamagotchi inside a transparent plastic shell, exposing only the three control buttons and the chrome jump ring on top. I picked up the dead little guy, firmly clamped the plastic shell extra shut with both hands, and dropped him into the recesses of my purse.
new year, new you
My friend had texted me a link to an obituary. I opened the link and stared at the name, the photo.
“Wait, is this…??” I replied.
She wasn’t sure, she said, but the obit’s details certainly squared with what the elderly man had told us about his life back in August. The deceased was the same age as the man we’d met, and his first name indeed began with the letter K. He’d passed away on Christmas Eve. I was shocked. I left the obituary open in a browser tab for several days, periodically reexamining it.
“I’m convinced,” I finally told my friend on December 30. “I wasn’t sure. I mean, I was, but I kept questioning myself. I kept thinking maybe I’d looked at the photo too long? But I’m almost positive. His smile and teeth are so distinctive.” And his eyes, and his forehead, and his whole face. I laughed and wiped the sleep out of my eyes. I'd considered driving to the memorial early that morning. “Crazy,” I whispered. “Crazy.” (Over a week later, my friend would express even greater certainty. “I opened the obituary, and I looked at the photo and I just went, ‘That's him,’” she told me of finding it.)
In August I’d said it was very important to not put any stock into what he was saying about the long Twilight Zone winter that would soon enough descend upon us. “I’m not saying I don’t believe him,” I’d told her, very warily, “I’m just saying we’ll never see it.” I sighed. I squirmed. “I don’t want to say it out loud. But I think it’s probably like a Halley’s Comet thing?” Eventually I was explicit: “I think he’s predicting the day his world ends,” I told her.
Then, sometime before Christmas, I’d mentioned the encounter with the elderly man to my friend’s brother. We described what had happened. It had been unnerving, I told him.
“Well, yeah,” he said, “it would be unnerving, to be in that close proximity to someone who is mentally unwell.”
I blinked. “He was fine,” I said in disbelief, “just very old.”
Now it was his turn to reciprocate my disbelief. His mouth opened, but no words came out.
“Mirror neurons,” I finally said in exasperation, turning away from him and shrugging helplessly. “That’s the only thing I can figure. I don’t know! I think some people are blank slates and they just… say whatever we’re subconsciously projecting, or something. That’s my best guess.”
My friend explained that strange people are routinely attracted to me—that I regularly experience bizarre encounters with strangers in the wild. They just beeline toward me and cut in and start talking.
I picked up the explanation where she’d left off. “Because they can tell I have poor—us. Porous boundaries,” I said. I looked at her brother. “I’m getting better,” I told him. “At limiting interactions with strangers. I’ve been cultivating my RBF.” He smiled at me, genuinely smiled.
I should’ve specified superfluous interactions: keep it tidy; keep it together; keep my attention laser-focused. RBF.
Now we were in the car running a pre-New Year’s Eve errand.
“I knew he was LDS, I just knew it from the way he was speaking,” my friend said, a little triumphant, of the elderly man. Then her face softened. “I wonder what he saw.”
“I wonder, too,” I said. “I think a lot about how people always hallucinate their loved ones in the room with them.” I was hoping whatever he’d experienced was wondrous, miraculous, rather than remotely frightening.
Now I started laugh-crying. “His flirting takes on a slightly insidious meaning, in light of what [the caregiver] told me about LDS and marriage. ‘You’re a rotten, rotten girl’? ‘If I were a little younger’? He wanted to save my life.” Save my life by ensuring I’d end up on his home planet, that is. He’d been a respected theologian and lecturer. I wiped my eyes and shook my head. “God, I hope that isn’t how anything works,” I muttered under my breath.
In October 2024, I’d received, in the mail, my handy-dandy proof of online ordination in the Universal Life Church. My husband had been skeptical.
“Do you really believe that all religions are equally true and valid,” he’d challenged me, in a way that, at the time, I’d interpreted as teasing.
“I think so?” I’d said, shrugging.
I had not yet learned to appreciate that, sometimes, some people might be able to articulate a question that is already festering on the back burners of our brains, where we otherwise wouldn’t be able to get at it.
grown-ups
In the store’s toy aisle, I’d found the Furbies and other virtual pets. My friend sighed as I carefully read each box, as if I were reading ingredients on pantry goods. I put a capsule toy in the cart, then a new fidget for the child. The fidget was a gummy, sparkly balloon-dog that could stretch beyond normal proportions, then be prodded back into its original size and shape.
I’d left the aisle, changed my mind, hurried back down it, grabbed a Tamagotchi Paradise from the shelf, then tossed it into the shopping cart.
“Seriously?” my friend said.
“I know. This is the last day of Christmas shopping,” I joked. We laughed. I might’ve mumbled something about Tamagotchi Paradise devices being “popular with adults.”
At check-out, the cashier did not hold back.
“Whoa,” he said, holding up the Tamagotchi Paradise next to his face, as if starring in an infomercial, and looking directly at me. “This thing is kind of expensive.”
“It’s… popular with adults,” I managed, dying of shame.
“Oh,” he said. “Like Nintendo.”
My eyes flashed wide at him. “Yes,” I said, “exactly like Nintendo.” I thanked him for my bag and scurried off.
My friend paused near the store’s exit, digging around her purse.
“It’s wild he said that,” I said. “I’m constantly complaining about Nintendo fanboys, these grown adult men barreling through a store, shoving little children out of the way to get their hands on some new game or console,” I said to my friend. Ooh, I hate them! They think, just because they have better hand-eye coordination, they’re more entitled to a joyful experience. “But I am a Nintendo fanboy. Like, that is exactly who I am. Ugh!!” I stood there. (Or I should say, my greatest fear is of behaving like one—of treating children the way my biological parents, overgrown kids themselves, treated me.)
I peeked inside my plastic bag.
“Should I, like, return this right away?” I asked her. “Like, right now?”
“What?” my friend asked me, looking up.
I looked down at the 6-year old next to me.
“Can I give you my Tamagotchi when you’re old enough to play it?”
She nodded vigorously.
“I can, like, bequeath it to you?” I asked. She continued to nod. “Okay,” I said. We started to walk toward the exit. “It is imperative that you learn to read,” I said then, in a very low voice. “You have to be able to read in order to take care of a Tamagotchi.”
RTFM
We (I) got the other toys open, and then I carefully removed the Tamagotchi from its box. I sat down with the included, full-color Tamagotchi Paradise “Nurturing Guide” and began to read it. The 6-year old appeared near my shoulder, having perched herself on her knees on an adjacent dining banquette. I pivoted the booklet so she could see. I began reading aloud and pointing at the beautifully printed diagrams.
At some point I needed to do some other sort of kitchen chore, so I handed her the booklet and asked her to continue without me—to examine the diagrams and illustrations and make out what she could and try her best.
“You have to clean them?” she eventually asked me.
“Yep! I’ll be right there,” I said. I dried my hands and walked back over. I squinted at the page.
“That's a sponge,” she said. She pointed at a tiny image. I got close and lifted my eyeglasses. She had correctly identified a small yellow oval as a sponge.
“That is a sponge,” I said to her, floored.
“And that’s poop,” she said.
I lifted my eyeglasses again. She had correctly identified several microscopic soft-serve emoji as poop.
“Clean up poop frequently and use it as biofuel,” I read aloud. “Huh. That’s interesting. You collect poop to make electricity.”
I went to the counter and picked up my screwdriver, which I’d left there earlier for the 13-year old, and I installed batteries in the device. I went through the opening screen, setting the time and date. Then we had to enter a name for our new Tamagotchi planet.
“What should we call it?” I asked the child. She looked at me helplessly.
“What should we call it?” I asked her mother.
“Avalon,” her mother said. I choked.
“What?” I asked her.
“What,” her mother asked back. “That’s just what I named my Animal Crossing island.”
“Oh-kay,” I said. Then I mumbled “mine was always called Butts.”
Oh. We’d taken too long to decide, so I had to go through the opening steps a second time.
“A-V-A-L-O-N,” I said as I entered the name.
An egg began to hatch on the screen.
“Our Tamagotchi is being born!” the child exclaimed.
A little green anthropomorphic globe appeared on the screen, surrounded by stars. The globe had a birdlike face.
“No, our Tamagotchi’s planet has been born!” I said, stunned.
The Tamagotchi Paradise has a dial sticking out of the device. I suddenly understood what it was for.
“Oh my gosh,” I said to the child, “look. We can zoom in and out. Cosmic view.” I zoomed in. “Environmental view.” I zoomed in again. “Tamagotchi view.” I zoomed in even closer, zooming inside our baby Tamagotchi. “Microscopic view!” I exclaimed.
In microscopic view, you can consult the menu and check the Tamagotchi’s health and hunger stats (“he’s happy on a cellular level,” I suggested). You can also physically knock away microbes, should your Tamagotchi become ill.
“This is incredible,” I said. “This is a whole philosophical treatise about the circle of life, hidden in a child’s toy. Japan, you so crazy.”
I started feeding the Tamagotchi and playing its little reindeer games. These games were very boring. I groaned.
I pointed out that this was one of the reasons Tamagotchi Paradise is so popular with adults: there is a “babysitter” setting, so you can just walk off for the day. I hadn’t found the setting in the menus yet, however. I don’t think it’s unlocked yet, actually.
“Those things are so annoying,” one of the 14-year olds told me. “I always had to get someone to take care of mine while I was at school.” It was something I’d recently heard from the grandpa, too—that, when my peers were growing up, he’d often gotten stuck on virtual pet care duty.
“I'm already exhausted,” I said, slumping in my seat. “The problem is, I can only ask one person to babysit my Tamagotchi for me, because only one person has read the Nurturing Guide, and that person is me.”
I said that, and then I slowly turned to side-eye the 6-year old, who was looking back at me expectantly. She appeared confident.
“Think you can handle it?” I asked her. She nodded. I handed the newborn Tamagotchi to her. “Good luck,” I said to her. “Let me know if you have any questions.”
She opened the menus. “Which one is ‘clean’?” she asked me.
“Clean,” I said, “starts with C-L. Clean poop. Poop is P-O-O-P.” P-O-O-P, that spells poop, I whispered under my breath as I stood up.
This went on for a long time—her, asking for help around the menus, me, reading and spelling them out for her. My eyes began to water. I walked into the pantry, where the child's mother was tidying.
“She’s so determined to inherit that Tamagotchi from me sooner rather than later,” I said to the child’s mother, “she is in there brute-forcing the menus.” I wiped my eyes. “I’m so proud of her,” I whispered. This kid was going to learn to read just to take the Tamagotchi from me.
I’d learned to read from a Wonder Woman comic book. Tamagotchi Paradise’s menus are going to be this kid’s Wonder Woman.
generations
Now that the 6-year old and I are raising a pet Tamagotchi together, it is the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I look at before bed. I check on it throughout the day, handing it off to the child when she gets home from school.
I told the child’s mother that I no longer regretted buying the Tamagotchi. I listed its benefits. I’d recommend one to anyone.
“Well, it’s only the cost of two regular ones,” she said, referring to the price disparity between generations 1/2 and the Tamagotchi Paradise, “and it’s so much better.”
I thought about this for a moment and then nodded in agreement.
“I’m really grateful,” I said. “Just to be here.” And to be able to spend so much time around the family, I added. “I would’ve missed this phase otherwise,” I said. Then I inhaled sharply.
I didn’t mean to center my own experience, and in my day-to-day I generally don’t, except for when I’m alone and lost in thought, or when I’m writing a bearblog. “This phase of my life,” I clarified, “not just your kids’ lives.” My eyes were wet. My friend nodded. She knows I keep skipping periods.
“We’re glad you’re here,” she said.