You look at the manicured lawn through the window and the way the streetlights hit the asphalt—it’s sterile, isn't it? After the commute, after the polite nods at the grocery store, you settle into that ergonomic chair your daughter bought for your "posture." You don't tell them what happens once the lights go out. The cognitive dissonance of being a grandmother in a zip code where everything is beige while you're secretly a HIGH-TIER carry in a digital wasteland is... it’s a physiological anomaly. You spend your days discussing hydrangea fertilizer and your nights calculating bullet drop and recoil patterns. You log in around 11 PM. The UI is bright, aggressive, a complete sensory OVERLOAD compared to the silence of the American suburb. You’re seventy, but your reaction time—while technically degraded compared to a twenty-year-old—is still sharp enough to hit those headshots. You find yourself in the lobby with three kids who haven't even finished their algebra homework. They’re yelling about "goated" plays and "mid" loot. You know the lingo. You study it like a foreign language to avoid DETECTION. It is a necessary camouflage. The headset stays muted. ALWAYS. You know that feeling when you have something vital to say—a flank coming from the north, a med-kit dropped in the corner—but the risk of vocal exposure is too high? If they heard the tremor, the cadence of an elderly woman, the illusion SHATTERS. They’d call you "Grandma" or worse, they’d be "nice" to you. And being patronized is a form of social death. So you communicate through pings. Methodical. Precise. A series of electronic beeps that replace the voice you’ve used for seven decades. It’s an efficient system of non-verbal communication. We were in the final circle tonight. The zone was shrinking into a cluster of urban ruins—ironic, since my actual neighborhood is so well-maintained. My teammates, "Z-Sn1per" and some kid with a name that’s just a string of numbers, were panicked. Their breathing was heavy in my ears, that rapid, shallow respiration typical of ADRENALINE spikes. One of them got downed. He’s screaming into his mic, "Bro, help, he's finishing me!" I didn't move. I waited for the enemy to reload. It’s a calculated risk assessment, one you only learn after living through enough actual history. I slid out from behind the cover of a rusted truck, hit the crouch-jump, and emptied a magazine into the opponent's torso. The kill-feed lit up. My hands were shaking, not with age, but with the visceral THRILL of the hunt. You feel your heart rate hit 110 beats per minute. The kid is shouting, "Yo, this guy is cracked! Who IS this?" I stood over his digital body, dropped a shield battery for him, and moved on. I wanted to tell him "You’re welcome, dear," but the silence is the price of admission. You just keep your thumb on the toggle and pretend to be a ghost. Tonight, it hit a breaking point. One of them—the kid who’s probably fifteen and sounds like he’s crying—said, "I wish my dad was like you, man. You actually show up." It’s a heavy burden, a sudden influx of unearned emotional WEIGHT. I’m sitting in a dark room in a house worth half a million dollars, ignoring three unread texts from my own son about Sunday brunch, because I’d rather be a nameless god to a lonely teenager in Ohio. The hypocrisy is palpable. It’s a dereliction of duty, but the digital feedback loop is more immediate than anything in my "real" life. You walk to the kitchen to get water after the match. The hardwood floors are cold. Everything is so quiet it feels AGGRESSIVE. You look at the family photos on the mantle—smiling, staged, perfectly lit—and you realize those people don't know you. They know the version of you that likes gardening and complains about the HOA. They don't know the version that has a 3.5 K/D ratio and listens to teenagers vent about their failing grades while you carry them to a victory royale. The bifurcation of the self is nearly COMPLETE. My eyes are bloodshot. The blue light has probably permanently altered my circadian rhythm. But when you’re seventy, the world starts treating you like a GHOST. You’re invisible at the bank, invisible at the mall. In the game, I am the primary actor. I am the DECIDING factor between life and death. The dopamine hit is a necessary intervention against the stagnation of retirement. But then you catch your reflection in the black screen after you log off. It’s just an old woman in the dark. A glitch in the system that nobody is looking for. The sun will be up in two hours. I have to go to the pharmacy later and act like I don't know what "no cap" means. I'll listen to the pharmacist explain my blood pressure medication in that slow, LOUD voice people use for the elderly. I’ll nod. I’ll be "sweet." And then I’ll come home, wait for the streetlights to flicker on, and put the headset back on. The cycle is repetitive, maybe even pathological, but the alternative is simply waiting to disappear—and I’m not ready to be ELIMINATED yet...