Can’t Keep It

I waited a week for that Burning Crusade beta key like I was twelve again. The kind of stupid anticipation where you check your email every hour, refresh forums, convince yourself you’ve earned this somehow. Then it showed up in my inbox and I couldn’t use it.

This was 2006, and The Burning Crusade was the expansion everyone was talking about. Blood elves, Draenei, new zones, the Outlands—it was supposed to be huge. Getting into the beta felt like winning something. For about an hour I actually felt like I had won something.

But I needed money. Not eventually, but actually needed it now. There was a distance-learning program I was trying to fund, and a beta key wasn’t going to cut it. So I auctioned it off. Put it up on eBay, wrote some encouraging shit about how much fun the buyer would have, and watched someone else claim the week I wasn’t going to get.

It’s funny what sticks with you. Not the expansion—I played it when it launched anyway, like everyone else. But that specific letdown, getting something you want and knowing immediately that you can’t have it. That feeling’s sharper than the thing itself.