This essay assumes you’ve already seen Box Peek. If you haven’t seen Box Peek, go watch Box Peek, then come read this essay (or don’t, so long as you’ve watched Box Peek).

              You are a 31-year-old graduate student in a Master of Counseling program. When you finish the program, you will be qualified for licensure in your state. When you finish the program, you will, theoretically, be qualified to help people: with depression, with anxiety, with grief, with trauma, with isolation, with phobias, with anger, with loss. You will, theoretically, be someone who sits in a small, cozy room with one other person and attempts one of the hardest things a person can attempt, which is to be fully present and connected, to empathize without judgment, to cradle another human’s quivering self in the warmth you create.
              You live in a place where it’s winter six months of the year and nighttime starts at 4pm. Your school, which you travel to for class about once a week (your other coursework is online) is about 40 minutes away. It’s about 40 minutes away for most of your classmates, too, in all different directions; you don’t really see each other outside of classes.
              You don’t really have local friends, for reasons not germane to this essay but which involve a truly unpleasant ex. For a few years you had a local boyfriend who made you happy, but he moved away for a much better job and he’s your ex now too. No hard feelings. Not much to say about it.
              Before he moved away, when you saw each other most days of the week and cooked together and--before he moved away, he introduced you to a lot of things (and vice versa, you hope). He showed you some funny YouTube videos from a guy named Kyle Bosman, who used to work at one game-related business and now works at another game-related business and you didn’t keep too much track of that at first, but you did yell “Glinny, GOOOO” at each other from time to time, and you kept watching videos.

              It turned out the defunct game-related business was called GameTrailers, and the new game-related business is called Easy Allies, and rather than being the thing you think of when you hear about “a group of dudes talking about games,” it is… not that. It’s almost the opposite of that, except that they still talk about games. And movies, and the craft of art in general, and sometimes even how to exist as a human, which is hard. And the community around this group, which you are reluctant to call a fanbase, is generally not too dissimilar: they like games, and movies, and the craft of art, and figuring out how to exist as a human.
              [When you were an English major undergraduate, your favorite professor said something you’ve never stopped thinking about: “Don’t live in a way which makes you feel dead.”]
              They have a lot of uploaded videos, but you like it best when you can catch the livestreams. You watch them in the breaks between your readings. Your summer class on family therapy involves a dozen or so roughly-two-hour-long videos that include a real session of family therapy and a discussion with the therapist afterwards. You watch these videos--sometimes they make you cry--and then you watch a video where two grown men, one who grew up playing Pokemon and one who never has, discuss the latter playing Pokemon for the first time. (You also grew up playing Pokemon. You have favorite Pokemon, favorite games. You can’t imagine playing it for the first time as an adult, but to see someone else do it is a delight.)
              You also watch Box Peek. Months before he moved (before he even got the job offer), your boyfriend got you both matching Jordy t-shirts. It’s still one of your favorite shirts, although the multiple times you’ve been complimented on it and tried to explain what Box Peek is, in thirty seconds, to a stranger, have been challenging.
              Here is what Box Peek is:
              Box Peek is a non-traditionally-animated animated show about a game which would never work in the real world, where you sit in a box and look out of a box and sometimes someone looks at you out of a box and depending on who looked at who when and whether the box was open at the time, one of you wins, and then you go eat chicken tenders.
              Box Peek is a show consisting of ten roughly 10-minute animated shorts where the scenery and characters and objects are all cut-paper puppets, except for the boxes, which are real (paper) boxes. Everything you see in Box Peek is a physical object that has been drawn and colored and cut out by hand, specifically by one person’s hands, that guy named Kyle Bosman whose music video about someone else’s cat your now-ex-boyfriend showed you years ago. The voices are provided by members of the Easy Allies or friends or family of members of the Easy Allies.
              Box Peek is a show set up as a loving parody of specific kinds of shonen anime, where a plucky young protagonist becomes The Very Best Like No One Ever Was at some kind of sport, competition, skill, etc, while cheered on and aided by The Friends He Made Along The Way, Who Are The Real Treasure. Box Peek is a show about 12-year-old Jordy Defective (“Dee-FEK-ti-vay”), a plucky young protagonist who is uncannily good at Box Peek and is cheered on and aided by his friends CD and Kazomi.
               Box Peek is a show the first half of which is a triumphant struggle towards the top and the second half of which is the mirrored image of the emptiness the first half hid.
              Box Peek is a show where a charming little referee robot named PeekRef 12 gains sapience and learns to feel love and joy--for which it will be destroyed--then plots to free itself and its cohorts, plots to escape and experience its own life, and then silently accepts that its own plans are fundamentally hopeless, an anodyne in its final moments, and self-destructs. Box Peek is a show where the charming little robot’s final missive, a plangent “Good luck, Jordy,” is casually slam-dunked in a trash can without reaching its recipient. Box Peek is a show where the remains of PeekRef 12 are the tiny, cut-paper pieces of PeekRef 12. PeekRef12 is gone.

don’t live in a way which makes you feel dead

              Box Peek is a show where everyone in Box Peek worships Box Peek. They do not worship it in the Sunday church sense but in the way that people will always find something to worship. You have read a lot of David Foster Wallace--maybe too much David Foster Wallace, if you’re going to be honest with yourself--and you are highly familiar with his obsession with the way that humans worship, not on their knees saying a prayer, but by taking something and putting it into the empty space inside, to make it go away or seem to go away. What David Foster Wallace calls “the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.” Taking something and making it the one thing you imbue with meaning.
              “Worship power--you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart--you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
              Box Peek is a show where everyone worships Box Peek. There is no concern but Box Peek. There is no purpose or success without Box Peek.
              And Box Peek is empty.              Box Peek is a show where every character is clutching tight to the game they worship because they do not know how to connect to other people, and the conduit that masquerades as connection is a distraction crafted to distance.
              In Box Peek, you can win in two ways:
              One: You peek out of your box at your opponent’s box for an uninterrupted four seconds.
              Two: You peek out of your box at your opponent’s box as they are peeking at you, interrupting them and winning the game.
              You can either forgo connection by staring at a closed box for four seconds or undermine connection by making attempted eye contact into a loss condition. You look out to find someone and if you are found, you lose. You look out to find someone and if you find them, they lose.
              Grad school, it turns out, is lonely. You and your peers are all stressed and busy and a lot of the time when you commiserate about how stressed and busy you are it just makes you feel more stressed. Your goal is to foster healing and it turns out that means learning a lot about some of the worst things human beings can experience. You’re training and studying to be able to help a person largely by means of true and vital human connection but all your communication goes through texts and chat windows and the occasional email. You spend nearly all of your time in your office, where your desk faces the wall. You are not that far from being in a box yourself.
              When Jordy sees how hollow the game is--just when it would be most tempting to hold it to himself and worship all the harder--the fragile, facile connections that Box Peek shored up simply collapse. The world so abhors a non-Box-Peeker that Jordy is completely gone as soon as the scene where he denounces the game is over.
              And because--again--this is a world made of paper, Jordy is really gone. The puppets, little physical crafted things made by one person’s hands, little physical crafted things that you could touch or hold, are another potential avenue for connection, but again that connection is foiled. (And those puppets, with the occasional ballpoint pen smear or visible string, stand as reminders not only of the physical, handmade properties of the show, but of the fact that the show has been crafted by a single person, with the restraints to time and resources you’d expect from a single person. This craftedness only adds to the humanness of the show, and the loneliness that comes with it.) Jordy sees that the worship is hollow and his physical form no longer exists. Just as Jordy approaches being able to discard this empty worship and seek real connection, he is gone. Just as PeekRef 12 discovers love and joy and a potential connection to someone else, it self-destructs.
              Without Jordy, Kazomi and CD aren’t really friends. Each of them had bent their life around this connection in some way, tethered it to themselves--but through the harsh channel of Box Peek, which has taken its toll. Whatever faux-connection they had  before, it’s gone with him and the dissolution of Box Peek as an institution. Even the connections they supposedly had with Jordy--“JORDY IS MY BEST FRIEND”--ultimately come down to nothing more than two nonrefundable custom tees. As soon as he’s detached from Box Peek, he vanishes, and their relationships weren’t even meaningful enough to exist outside of Box Peek. They want to give back the vestiges of those relationships, but they can’t. The empty trophies persist.

the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing

              You think about the future a lot. You think about the future a lot while studying ways to live in the present, studying how to help others move away from holding too tight to the past or putting so much of themselves into the future that they’re paralyzed right now. You and your peers use the word “mindfulness” a lot. You swap breathing exercises and book recommendations and you, personally, talk about DBT way too much. Sometimes you stare at the schedule you were given at orientation, where all your classes are laid out in neat boxes, and then internship, and then licensure, and you feel like you won’t exist until 2023, a year that sounds fake. Sometimes you get this mental image of the vast empty space between the Earth and the moon, the vacuum between our rock and the closest thing to it, and you feel that far from where you are. You try to exist here right now, which is of course all anyone has. And you think about the future. And you think about the future. And you think about the future.

it is two hundred ninety-eight thousand nine hundred miles between the Earth and the moon

              You study a lot of different theories of counseling. Some of them don’t gel with you at all. A lot of them seem to overlap--providing different rationales for similar actions. But nearly every one--certainly all the ones you feel aligned with--agrees that three basic principles are required for a successful therapeutic relationship: unconditional positive regard, empathy, and authenticity.
              Connection. A genuine knowledge that you are interfacing wholly, honestly, and compassionately with another person. That you are reaching out your hand and your hand is being grasped, warmly, tightly, lovingly, and you are being pulled close. When our lives are pared down, this is the thing that still exists.
              Connection is the thing we can use to find healthy paths of worship. Connection is the thing that can offset or replace that gnawing center. You cannot find it hiding in a box. You cannot find it in a four-second window. You cannot find it without risk, but you cannot live without it.
              In fact, connection is so vital that you’ve even written this essay in the second person, reaching out to the reader and putting us both in the same place. Because you--the real you, the person reading this--are not me, the 31-year-old graduate student who cried at the Box Peek finale and reads David Foster Wallace and uses jokes like smoke bombs, to get away. You are someone totally different. And I--again, the graduate student in question--don’t know you, but I have clawed together this essay and I hold it out to you, fiercely, in both my hands: here, I’m reaching out for you, are you there? Do you hear me?
              Drawing and coloring and cutting out dozens of hand-sized paper puppets, crafting this meticulous and crystallized story: here, I’m reaching out for you, are you there?
              Do you hear me?

              Do you hear me?