I was in a very nostalgic mood the other day, the kind that paints everything in this kind of warm, ashen tone that makes everything ache just enough to feel real, the kind that makes you look back and realize that it was all worth the smiles and the hardships.
And, so, I went digging for some tangible proof that it had all actually happened, diving head-first into boxes and plastic bins, across jammed drawers and wardrobes whose inner doors still have the "claw" marks of childhood, the places where my sister and I both attacked them with crayons and pencils as if to mark our territory. Inside of those I found a lot of those little treasures we seem to love to forget: the loose pieces of a board game long buried, the accessories for an action figure that stood nowhere in-sight; even the dust-crusted shell of cool-looking robot that seems to be frozen in time, eagerly waiting for the time in which batteries would be again inserted into its back compartment and it could grant it life once more, delight the new generations with the kind of light show that made my childhood evenings all the more pleasant.
None of those things were the stars of this story, though... the one item that caught my eye and drew me in like a magnet was something much humbler, the kind of thing I'd have dismissed entirely as a kid: a thick, cardboard folder containing dozens of old photographs covered in foil and stamped on the back with the classic Kodak logo, printouts already curling on the ends. These were snapshots of a lost life, of a lost age, even of a lost world that allowed me to see younger versions of both myself and my loved ones caught in a single moment, our smiles echoing through eternity as the ink that brought us to the modern era began to fade, already falling victim to the ceaseless march of the clocks but still soldiering on as if performing a last-stand against the winged beast of oblivion.
Old buddy, old pal...
Among these relics were pictures of my two best friends and I tackling each other in a beautiful park, smiling like idiots at the camera as we ate grass and ruined our clothes with the kind of gleeful deattachment that could only exist in childhood, pure as the friendship that had fueled that moment. Another picture was of me sitting on my underwear at age 8 and watching with religious devotion as Eze, my pet hamster, tried to climb out of his enclosure, begging for pellets in a way that was so universally his. There was even a rare image of me and my sister loving every damn second of life as we came into focus against a breathtaking backdrop full of sand and the untold majesty of the Atlantic Ocean roaring behind us during an ancient trip to Mar del Plata.
The image that made me stop dead in my tracks, however, was so subtle that I almost didn't recognize it: a shot my dad took during one of our school plays, my best friends and I linking arms together as we had just finished performing some painfully amateur rendition of a great classic (I have honestly forgotten which one -- we butchered a lot of those!). In the corner of that frame, pictured by pure, dumb luck (as they were already walking away by the time the shutter was pressed) were the backs of Jessica and Johanna, two classmates I hadn't thought about in a solid two decades at that point.
I had never cared too much for Johanna because she was outgoing to the point of aggressiveness, always cracking funny jokes and getting on people's faces just so she'd have an audience, a terrible match for my extremely shy personality (and I'm ashamed to say that I was more than a little relieved when she finally switched schools the following year).
Those long, forgotten Summers of untamed friendship.
Jess and I were the kind of instant friends that could have only existed in childhood, though.
My entire grade had suffered so many "casualties" during the Summer (in the form of kids getting pulled out of this particular school as the economy was beginning to collapse) that the old rules simply didn't apply anymore: the ancient sitting chart that we had been using since the First Grade had to be shredded because it no longer required some minor adjustments like the world's longest game of Chess, but had to be reworked entirely to patch up all the holes left by kids that were no longer there.
Due to a combination of me needing a front-row seat due bad eyesight and the now Johanna-less Jess having a heart of gold and accepting to keep me company on the whiteboard gulag, we were paired right up and stayed there for the duration of the year, until a fresh wave of arrivals and even more casualties ended up reshuffling the entire board again. But because Jess and I had volunteered to do this, we got the --extremely rare-- opportunity of picking our own seats, which could only mean one thing: we got the coveted table by the heater, a god-send during Winter and a place we had collectively dubbed "Shenanigans Central" as, in typical nine-year-old fashion, we all learned that we could deform our plastic pens by setting them against the metal frame of the aforementioned devise, resulting on useless, bent pieces of exploding ink that most certainly triggered earfuls back home, much like when we had sharpened both ends of our pencils as First Graders.
The whiteboard Gulag.
I had thought for certain that sitting with Jessica was going to be hell (she was, indeed, my first female deskmate at a time when teasing for that sort of thing was at its peak... aren't kids the greatest?) but she surprised me yet again by being a total bro (or, well, sis) about it: she was always willing to go along with whatever I wanted to talk about, and she was always on top of her game, too, a far cry from the nod-along automaton I had expected to be sharing air and space with in increasingly awkward ways.
She knew her Pokémon up and down. She knew the plots of all my favorite cartoons. She was a die-hard fan of my favorite gaming shows, and she was also a Minesweeper JUGGERNAUT, making computer lab all the more enjoyable by having me compete against her every time we managed to complete one of our assignments on the trial version of Creative Writer or in Excel.
However... what I most remember Jessica for was none of those things (nor her eternal high ponytail, which I'm told she still sports), but the fact that her eyes would really light up whenever I'd get excited about something to the point of tripping over my own words, making me believe that she truly cared. And the thing that had me going like none other during that Fall and Winter of 1999 was Caesar III, a city-management game whose demo my dad had brought home one lazy afternoon and that I was extremely into by dinnertime.
My humble kingdom.
Even though I didn't speak a word of English at the time, Caesar III (or at least its demo) was tooled in a way that you'd eventually figure out what to do if you messed with enough buttons... and messing with buttons was my middle name.
I remember the utter, new-found excitement of playing the game both for myself and also to report back to Jess whatever I had managed to unlock or accomplish the day before, rushing to my desk and going on breathless speeches about the state of my Roman village while she smiled along and asked me specific questions that really made me realize she was actually listening. It was almost a sport at one point, with us squeezing every possible moment between getting on our seats and the actual start of class just to go over random updates and colorful commentary regarding the game and we mastered it pretty quickly.
I remember her hearty laugh when I told her about both a massive fuck-up on my part and my overreaction to fixing it later on (I had basically blown my entire budget building a long row of Roman "fire departments" so a single punk wouldn't burn it all to the ground after I had had that happen once during a very intense playthrough in which everything was going well and that nearly ended up with my keyboard meeting the wall). We even shared a thundering high five when I told her that I had finally managed to unlock both the theater and the Coliseum.
The sprawling metropolis I SO BADLY wanted to have.
Childhood had never been sweeter.
Unfortunately, the fact that I was playing the demo didn't really occur to me as I was battling my way through the game's (surprisingly involved) management system, going out of my way to strategize ways of getting the population increases necessary to unlock the sweetest rewards, unlocking a Gladiator school and getting a play of "Homer" going in the Amphitheater before I hit a wall at a hundred miles per hour.
To this day I still have no idea if this was a glitch or the game being a complete asshole about it, but the thing is that I was already well on my way to getting to 700 citizens (and therefore unlocking the next tier of buildings I could place, which I had been working towards for days upon days of hogging the computer and sweating all-over the mouse, much to my sister's murderous annoyance) when then, all of the sudden, the screen flashed and my population counter went back to zero, my buildings laying abandoned and my money stopping coming in... not even the damn tax collector was doing his rounds after that. I was the major of a ghost town whose aqueducts were the only moving things. It was all shocking and heartbreaking at the same time and I couldn't do a damn thing about it, either, for even the constant flow of new arrivals pushing carts and looking for a place to settle had completely dried out. My game was as frozen in time as an actual Roman village and no amount of reloading and rebooting (the classic panic tools of young videogaming) could ever get it solved.
Reality check.
I was so deflated that I never picked the game back up... not after having my sole save file this lobotomized, this wrecked. And more than for me and the countless hours I had sunk into it, the whole thing hurt because I was sure that that was going to be the end of my friendship with Jessica. I was always the one who started the conversations, the one whose goofy grin always got things rolling during those glorious minutes until the teacher arrived and all fun was officially outlawed. Without that, we seemed doomed to go back to being strangers.
... But it just so happens that this whole fiasco allowed me to switch places with Jess (metaphorically speaking) and, once I lent my own ear to her, I learned just how much stuff she had to say.
Not only was she completely bummed by my save killing itself (or getting stabbed in the back, Julius Caeasar-style) but she also had a lot of ideas on how rebuild every bit of progress I had shared with her, despite never even laying eyes on the game herself. She kept outlining ideas that may just work with a little tweaking (and only because she didn't quite know how the mechanics actually worked) and that fired me up so hard that I actually wanted to do it right that instant, but then our chats switched to a more "middle-groundy" topic like Pokémon and we never looked back.
It's amazing just how much mileage we got out of this franchise.
We had a lot of debates over which of Ash's Pokémon would evolve next or what the next plot points were gonna be about. We had placed actual bets of $1 (a fortune!) on not only whether Ash and Gary would square off in the upcoming Pokémon League, but what was gonna happen during the match. We got so carried away by this whole thing that we took to writing at the margins of our notebooks, in plain sight of each other (but hidden from the teachers) so we could keep the conversations going. We would even commit huge crimes against both grammar and spelling by pouring our manic energy into the aforementioned Creative Writer assignments just so we would have something to say. It was some of the most incredible experiences I had had as a child, and I'm honestly shocked that this all almost got buried under everything else, set adrift down the foggy and treacherous sea of memories, never to be seen or heard from again.
Of course, I'd have loved nothing more than to keep updating Jess to the very end of my adventure as the major of a scrappy Roman-outpost-turned-Imperial-Capital, but that simply wasn't in the cards for us. And in destroying that goal so completely, the universe paved the road for the true ending I seemed to have been chasing all-along.
My decimated, digital village is ancient history.
The memories of my friendship with Jess are forever.
