Four Days of Looking at a Game Boy

There is a specific kind of Christmas morning misery that only children of the pre-Amazon era truly understand: the toy you can’t play with. Not broken—just missing batteries. The shops are closed, the relatives have gone home, and the best gift you’ve ever received is sitting on your dresser doing absolutely nothing.

This happened to me with my first Game Boy. Original grey brick, Pokémon cartridge already slotted in. Four days it sat there. My parents had forgotten to buy batteries, and nobody in the extended family had four AAs to spare. I could look at it, hold it, read the manual until I had it memorized. I just couldn’t turn it on.

The noise I made about this was, in retrospect, probably unreasonable. But I stand by it. There’s something almost cruel about giving a kid exactly what they wanted and then removing the one thing that makes it function. The gift becomes a prop. A promise with no follow-through. That gap between the object and its use—four days of staring at grey plastic—did something to me that I still feel every December when I’m wrapping presents. I check for batteries now. Every time.