The Name Written on a GameCube Controller

The Name Written on a GameCube Controller

A GameCube controller came across my bench last week with a name written on it. People did that — they wrote their names on these. A controller you carried to a friend's house. One your little brother was not allowed to touch. Mine. You feel it before you read the letters.

It was filthy. They almost always are. Of every console I clean, the GameCube controllers arrive the dirtiest — the grime of years of hands that did not want to let go. But the shell is a hard plastic, built to be dropped and gripped and dropped again. It gets dirty. It does not wear down. So I can bring it back.

A Famicom controller is the opposite. It barely scratches — but a scratch, once it is there, I cannot heal. The GameCube takes all the punishment and still returns. I clean one, the years lift away, and what is left looks close to the morning it was first unwrapped.

That morning is what I am after. Somewhere, a child tore the paper off a box and held this thing for the first time. I clean it, day after day, hoping the next person to hold it feels a little of that — the weight of a gift in the hand.

My range is limited. There are marks I cannot reach, and I know it — I want to get better at this. Even the name comes off in the end. I take it away gently, because this controller is not staying with me, and not going back to the child who wrote it. It is going forward, to someone who deserves their own first morning. I clean one child's years off the plastic so another can begin.