exist and for a while you can be anyone you want to be."
"And when you were a kid, you wanted to get away and be something else, right?" Gideon asked.
I nodded again. "I spent a lot of time in hospitals. During one of the longer stretches when I was in my early teens, one of the nurses felt sorry for me and brought me her son's old video game console and some games to go with it. When I was playing the games, I wasn't sick. Things didn't hurt. I was the valiant knight or the racecar driver or the brave fighter pilot. I wasn't a sickly kid tied to a dialysis machine. I wasn't someone whose body didn't work."
"They gave you a purpose," Gideon offered.
"Yes," I said. "They gave me a reason to open my eyes every day."
"So it wasn't the actual games, it was what the games gave you," Gideon clarified. "They gave you joy."
I nodded. He’d stripped it down to its simplest form and he was right. The video games had made me happy.
"I know you won't be able to play the games like you used to, but what if we play them together?" Gideon asked.
I shook my head in confusion. "If I can't play them on my own, how would I be able to play against you?"
"Not against me, with me." Gideon shifted and took the controller from my hand. I missed having him close, but I knew he hadn’t gone far because I could hear him shuffling around. He began asking questions about how to set the console up with his television. I was curious enough about what his plan was to talk him through the process. After a couple minutes, I heard wood scraping over wood and I realized he was moving the coffee table in front of the couch out of the way. Then his hand was taking mine.
"Let's sit on the floor," he said and then he was helping me down to the floor and positioning us so his back was against the couch and my back was against him. His legs were on either side of me.
"Okay," I said when I settled my hands on his thighs. "I can get on board with this."
I felt the rumble of Gideon's chuckle against my back. Just hearing him laugh was enough to make me not care about what would happen next. If me making a fool of myself while trying to play a video game in front of him would elicit this kind of response, I'd happily do it.
I couldn't make anything out in front of me besides the shape of the television and the small entertainment center it was sitting on, but I did hear the familiar music of my video game as it booted up. An unexpected rush of excitement washed over me. It was only amplified when Gideon placed the controller in my hand.
I still had no clue what we were doing. But then Gideon's fingers closed over mine on the controller and he began clicking some of the buttons as we walked through the stages of getting the game going. It finally registered what his plan was. He wanted us to play the game together. Together as in us being one character and working together to reach the end goal.
It seemed like a ridiculous idea, but as Gideon began reading the prompts on the screen to help us figure out our character, the same giddiness I'd always felt as a kid when I'd started a new game washed over me. I still didn't really understand how we would manage it, but I automatically began telling Gideon which traits and weapons we should select for our character. To my surprise, he began describing what was happening on the screen in considerable detail. Everything from what our character was wearing to what he looked like. Even though I knew what every screen looked like by heart, his descriptions were so vivid that it was like I was seeing the image for the first time. Not seeing with my eyes, but with my mind.
The man was actually being my eyes, but he was doing it in such a way that I could see. It was as if there were a rock in front of me but instead of just steering me around it, he was telling me its size, color, and shape, making it possible for me to see the thing in my mind’s eye and know what kind of berth I