A few weeks ago, I lost my handheld Tetris game. This was one of those cheap little jobbies you can purchase for 20 bucks at any old Wal-Mart, but it was as dear to me as if I had mortgaged my house to pay for it. Alas, how swiftly the tide changes. No sooner had I become intoxicated with its digital ambrosia than the cup was dashed from my lips.

I left my beloved Tetris at the gym by mistake. When I came back it had disappeared—gone from my life like a fickle lover. I was in shock. I couldn't catch my breath. My fingers twitched, aching for the tactility of those smooth gray buttons.

Tis a tenuous thread separating possession from loss.

I confess that this was not my first experience with addiction to Tetris. A roommate in college introduced me to it on her Nintendo system, and I became an instant junkie. It fed some ancient hunger in the back alley of my brain, and I played it nearly to distraction (and certainly to the detriment of my academic and nutritional well-being). Demands of the bladder often went ignored until I had gotten through "just five more lines," a fiction I designed for myself in order to feel more in control than I was. I played it until genuine, organic objects began to take on the shapes from the game—telephone poles, hedges, everything. I was utterly consumed. When I closed my eyes I could still see the screen, the pieces cascading down my eyelids like Matrix code. It was like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Ashley Judd and Wil Wheaton play that game with the cones until they are reduced to sad, lifeless shells of their former selves—personality all but syphoned out, every thought bent on getting the next fix.

If this is how easily my psyche gives over to non-lethal obsessions, it's a good thing I never tried heroin. I'd have gone from zero to Trainspotting in 8.5 seconds.

Once I graduated, I no longer had access to Tetris. I got sober the hard way. By this past January, though, I had nearly forgotten the depths to which I had sunk, how that seemingly innocuous device had taken me for a death roll beneath the waves and waited for me to stop kicking. So when I saw this little handheld Tetris game being sold for a mere pittance at Wally World, I snatched it up without a second thought.

You know what they say about possessions coming to own you? Well, that was an understatement in my case. I was enslaved. If Nick was filling the car with gas, I'd whip out the Tetris game. If I was standing in line at the grocery store, out it came. I couldn't just space out like I used to, enjoying the scenery or watching the passersby. Idle time was no longer an acceptable option—it made me edgy. I became Gollum. I became a character in a Stephen King story. I became Evil Ash Williams from Army of Darkness.

The more I think about it, the sorrier I feel for the unsuspecting soul who absconded with my Tetris game. Surely, it will be an albatross around his or her neck until the day someone else is able to wrest it away. And I must admit, I feel oddly liberated now that it's gone. I feel free to experience the world again without interruption, without the shadowy specter of falling blocks darkening my days.

But I don't kid myself. Deep down, I know that any reprieve can only be temporary. Some desires cannot be killed, or remonstrated with. The part of me that hungers for Tetris will always be there, like a dark thing hidden just below the surface—a secret tumor, waiting for its chance to come into the light again. This is one of those things we will carry with us to our graves, that will not dissolve until our bones fall to dust. And if someone unearths us after tens of thousands of years, it will not have been diminished one iota. There it will remain—quiet and coiled and patient—still waiting to beat the high score.