Hiding Champion Opens Up About Loneliness
I should have realized that spending four hours alone in my wardrobe was a red flag, especially since I live by myself. Is there like a five-second rule for hide-and-seek? Like, if you don’t get found within 30 minutes, you can come out of hiding? It was almost as bad as when I was hiding in my laundry hamper the other day, and I fell asleep for three hours after I’d already been hiding for two. It took $75 and a chiropractor to get all the kinks out of my neck. I’m beginning to think I need to invest in a portable charger to keep my phone from dying during my long hiding sessions. I’ve run out of levels in Candy Crush, and I can win Sudoku on expert level in under five minutes. I’ve recently downloaded a language app to kill time. Now that I’ve become fluent in Spanish, I think Norwegian is my next conquest.
The game doesn’t even get any better when I’m doing the seeking, which is not usually my forte. If there were Olympic Games for hide-and-seek, I would be a gold-medalist in hiding. For seeking, I wouldn’t even make the trials. I ran into a group of stoners outside the dining hall, and when I insisted I had finally found them, the one who was clearly the alpha male said, “Oh, I didn’t know we were playing “high-and-seek.” I spent all of last week being a seeker, and in that time I was slapped twice and cursed out five times, once by an elderly lady crossing the street. (In my defense, the middle of the street is a terrible hiding place.)
One time I hid in a construction zone overnight. I hid in one of the big ditches and covered myself in dirt. I made the mistake of falling asleep. I woke up in the morning 25 feet in the air because one of the Cat construction machines scooped me up. That was the only time I’ve ever been found, although the construction worker didn’t seem very excited.
My mom tells me I should make friends to play with me, but that sounds like work. Time for me to go find a new hiding place. I’m thinking the sewer. I’ve heard there are clowns there. I like clowns.
Sarah Moon is a second-year writing major who once counted to 1,000 before realizing they had no one to look for. You can reach them at [email protected].