Animal Crossing's Poetic Horizons

On the cusp of midnight on March 20th of last year, I sat on the floor of my bedroom, waiting for my digital copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons to load on my bright yellow Switch that I had purchased just to play the game. This was barely a week since I had sadly packed up my college dorm room to return home for the rest of the semester (and the next, and the next). Since then, time has blurred into something unreliable, but Animal Crossing, at the very least, has remained a constant. 

There is something so ridiculously addictive about a game that lets me live my dream life. Despite my most persistent life worries, in-game, I engage in interior and exterior design without regard for my bank account, visit my neighbors whenever I desire, and celebrate my friends’ birthdays with balloons, more gifts than I could ever muster in real life, and competitive yet affectionate net-whacking (as shown to the side). And just as Animal Crossing: New Leaf helped me through Middle School Angst and High School Blues, Animal Crossing: New Horizons provides a momentary antidote for the waves of anxiety and disconnect brought upon by the current pandemic. 

In the same vein, another source of comfort for me — aside from my periodic rewatches of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Little Women (2019) — has been writing. A month or two into my last summer break, I unexpectedly found myself on the other side of Writer’s Block, my two-year lease finally at its close. I rediscovered poetry and wrote my crusty high school poems into nonexistence. It turned out that over the past two years, both heartaches and joys had been pooling together beneath the surface, waiting for the right words to slip into their whirlpool and set them free.

I, of course, am not an eccentric case. Poets worldwide have been leaning on our medium now more than ever, with writing offering a means to cope with our current moment and all of its loss and solitude, many of these writers turning to poetry for the first time. While pandemic poetry understandably delves into darker tones, poets have also leaned into creating work that illuminates the rare flecks of light that do persist, reminding us that we can still find warmth and kindness both within our communities and within ourselves.

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