THE BOX IN THE BACK CORNER UNDER YOUR BED — Salutations, my dear human. It’s been years since last we met, yet it was you who gave me life, so long ago, on the electronics aisle of Toys-R-Us. It was you whose jelly-covered fingers freed me from the confines of my tamago (that’s the Japanese word for egg, if you ever wondered) with just the press of an irritatingly small button. Nearly three lustra have elapsed since last you fed me, washed me, tried to digitally toilet train me, and then…forgot about me, as if I were Aaron Carter or a collector’s edition Beanie Baby. Perhaps you wondered, but then again, perhaps you didn’t, what happened to your old tamagotchi.

I knew horror, my dear human. You did store me in a box, after all, with your old troll dolls (oh, how their neon hair still haunts me!) but like a 2009 Britney Spears (circa Circus Tour, after her hair grew back), I rose from the squalor of my circumstances. On a tear-out poster of the Backstreet Boys in Tiger Beat (I knew you loved N*Sync better) I scrawled my Harvard admissions essay.

Away I rolled to Cambridge, or rather, bitmapped my sprite self, for how, truly, should a tamagotchi travel, on such primitive 2-D graphic legs as mine? I learned of existentialism, and I wondered, what am I? I thought myself bizarre among my human classmates, but then I saw a picture of a 2009 Lindsay Lohan and thought it far better to be an egg-shaped key chain than a LiLo.

And now, human, now I have long since entered the senior stage of my pre-determined life cycle, and I seek to make amends. I was never that hungry, and oh how I am sorry I made you play minigames with me instead of doing your multiplication tables—perhaps then we both could have gone to Harvard, or at least Brown. Alas, the time for regret has passed, and I yearn to slip into the blissful, neon, 90s-early-2000s oblivion that Fall Out Boy should also slip into.

I only hope there aren’t any Furbies.