but the cove of my desk couldn’t muffle the audible chirp of food inside its little pixel mouth when I tried to feed it during math class and I honestly don’t remember if your Tamagotchi was a boy or a girl or what it’s four-letter name was but I do remember the angel wings that sprouted from its little pixel body when it died and the egg that replaced it, gestating where your late Tamagotchi once bounced and ate and shat, and on the school bus when we traded Tamagotchis back, mine alive and yours dead, you wept while I stared out the window and imagined what it would be like if the Earth flipped its axis and we fell through the emergency exit roof hatch into the cloudless sky, so needless to say we were both thinking about death and maybe that’s why you never mentioned it again, because death is scary, or maybe it’s because you tucked your Tamagotchi away in your bedside table and forgot about it until the acid of the button battery corroded its egg-shaped housing and killed it for real. Can you forgive me?

Circle     YES     or      NO