I started playing a video game yesterday. For a brief, deeply cynical and sarcastic moment, I heard a voice deep inside me squeal “I LOVE THIS GAME SO MUCH. LLLLLLLLOOOOOVE!!!” It’s not really true. The game’s OK, fun to look at, has its annoyances. But did I really mean anything by that distant squeal of joy as I commenced playing the game?

I ask myself sometimes: Am I really alive? Am I fully alive, or merely skimming experiences instead of indulging or immersing myself in them. I briefly imagined myself capable of finding complete, soul-fulfilling happiness by playing video games. All concerns and agita would evaporate the moment my eyes and hands took control of a colorful, candy-filled video game.

What was happiness? Did I ever experience it? I like to think I’ve made others happy, and that is its own form of happiness. But is the happiness I brought to others just a lie? A fantasy? A physical experience but nothing emotional or spiritual.

I remember having some friends over to hear me play a recital program I was going to be playing at a concert. It was a dress rehearsal, of sorts. Keri and Joe were there, as were two other people whose names escape me. They were married, and I knew them from that new-fangled Internet thing. This was 1998, I believe.

I played, it went well enough, and all seemed happy to have been there for a more or less unique encounter. The next day, the woman who I’m going to call Sarah even though I have no idea if that was her name, she wrote me an email saying that she had never felt so happy as when she was in that room, me at the piano and a few other friends. She described her happiness in a way I could never deny or cynically refute. I sometimes imagined I had a chance with her, after she divorced the husband with whom she attended my little soiree. But we drifted. Floated. Our bergs sailed apart.

I think we reconnected a couple of years later, after the divorce. I don’t remember why but I pretended to be unaware, but she knew I knew, and considered my phony expression of ignorance to be a sign of… something. Some character flaw. We cannot have those. Character flaws are worse than infidelity. It was not a character flaw. It was a gawky attempt to talk around what I thought would be a delicate or uncomfortable topic of conversation. I suppose it also came with the awkward weight of my selfish fantasies of getting it on with her. GETTING IT ON! That never happened.

I don’t know about my life right now. The predictable screed is to say I am becoming, I am evolving, I am heading toward something better, more evolved and substantive. But really, I am going nowhere. Happiness eludes me, and I have no confidence in my life’s direction. I don’t even have a clue where I might be tomorrow. Here? Probably. At this job, most likely.

Yesterday I moved around. Subways and buses, and 12,000 steps through Jackson Heights and Woodside. O, the hookers on Roosevelt Avenue. So brazen and crass. I have never and likely will never partake of the sex trade but I don’t stigmatize its participants. One of them practically forced me to take her calling card but I refused. I have troubles enough already.