I often write articles to honor and celebrate those who were hugely important to me, even though I know that the chance of them actually reading any of this is beyond slim. I also use video games as framing devises for these stories because I have come to realize that they work surprisingly well as a way to highlight the time they happened on without outright telling you when that was. It's kind of a neat trick, and one that I'm growing quite addicted to using (and it's also what allows me to get away with publishing these here).
The story you are about to hear is about someone whose sole name has become sort of forbidden lore in my household (because I don't have a death wish): my first girlfriend, Laura.
I like to think of Laura and me as slightly out-of-date cookie dough, the one that doesn't break the mold but doesn't quite fit in it, either. The kind you try desperately to coax into working because you truly believe that it could turn into something very sweet with just a little effort. But, of course, that never ended up happening, because what held us together wasn't exactly love (although we really did love each other) but our shared weirdness.
While many of our peers took to go clubbing every Saturday, digital camera on-hand, just to have something to upload to their impossibly bright and colorful Fotologs (the kind in which everything was impossible to read due to the awful color combinations used to make them), we enjoyed exploring the sleeping form of our city, wandering about every nook and cranny just to see what happened after the rat race was over for the day and no-one was out, life slowing down to a crawl as only the night owls and the eternally punished night-shift workers made their way back home. It's actually kind of a miracle that we didn't end up getting robbed while doing so, because we ended up in the middle of some very rough neighborhoods and weren't exactly shy about it, passing small bottles back-and-forth, shoving each other lovingly and even cracking jokes loud enough for lights to turn on windows. I guess you really do feel fearless when you are with that special someone.
But just because we were fearless, it didn't mean that the rest of the world was. And, in fact, many people seemed wary of our half-drunk, laughing ways as we were drawn to the many late-night and 24-hour businesses that we discovered along the way, swarming them like mosquitoes hovering around the zapper, with one particular instance still making me laugh just because of the sheer absurdity of it all.
It's actually kind of amazing that I went through three phones during my first relationship. Sure, they were all hand-me-downs, but it goes to show just how fast the world was moving at the time.
It was VERY late at night on a weekday and it was freezing, so we had already thought about calling it quits several times in a row by that point, just holding off to it because neither of us wanted to be seen as the weak one that had let just a little winter fun beat them. Nothing seemed to do the trick, and we were getting quite pissy about the whole thing... it's not that there wasn't stuff to do, it's that we just didn't feel like doing it. And then, just like that, we spotted one of those things whose sole existence still baffles me to this day: a 24-hour Internet Cafe, the kind where teenagers and people with nothing better to do would go to and camp out on at all sorts of ludicrous hours just to waste away on the (still brand-new) digital world. I remember how we basically huddled together, pooled our money and decided that we had enough for renting two machines for about an hour, which seemed plenty enough, considering that the ghost of a cold was already being felt on my nose.
The plan was simple: we would go in, sit down for a bit, then settle whatever stupid fight we had going on through Vampire Slayer (a genius, unjustly sidelined Half-Life mod that we really dug at the time). Then we would go on and use the remaining time to troll the chatrooms and tables of Yahoo! Games, because that's the way we rolled.
"Vampire Slayer" was actually the first multiplayer game I have ever played. It's strangely fitting.
We approached the door, tried it and... nothing.
We could see the dude inside and we knew that he could see us, too. But he just refused to open the door for us. He even made a pretty insulting attempt at telling us that the store was closed for the night (all whilst the "All-Night" neon sign buzzed overhead). It was a stupid stalemate, with us refusing to leave and the guy refusing to let us in. We eventually left (not before flashing a rude gesture, courtesy of Laura's always sharp mind), our butts even more frozen by the time we decided to go away. Looking back, though, I'm sure that we looked like the classic robbery act: swaying,
red-faced and disheveled. Yeah, I wouldn't open the door for us, either.
I liked being with Laura because that was our whole relationship.
We would sometimes share a pizza in the dingiest store in town, not caring that we were being served an order of grease with some tomato sauce on top. Or we would wander about and yell at open windows just for the hell of it. At one point we even started singing along as someone was playing their music loud enough to pool onto the street from their second-story window, making a point of drowning out the sound with our booming, non-musical, shrilling voices. I'm fairly sure someone attempted to throw something at us, but they didn't have good aim. We would also stare at security cameras for literally no reason, which amused me back then, but that I now realize might have been very unsettling for anyone watching the footage.
It's almost impossible to describe just how chaotic Yahoo! Games was at the time, getting so crowded, rowdy and noisey as to resemble a real bar... and we lived for the chaos of trolling people through the sheer power of being stupid teens.
We weren't crazy all the time, but it was simply funny when we were.
While we weren't lacking on social skills (at least not to an impossible degree), we were drawn to each other due to our mutual disregard for normalcy. We still had school, sports and activities, but we didn't appreciate the boundaries set around those things, which made them feel imprisoning and frankly suffocating. That's how we met, too.
While we had never spoken before, we were both part of a large rag-tag group of kids known for getting in trouble over the stupidest junk imaginable, like stealing worthless objects from the street or daring each other to drink from whatever flask or bottle they had managed to get their hands on. Because of that no-one was really surprised when they suggested that we broke into a sports facility and used their grass football pitch to play our illegal matches, quickly forming into teams without being told to and getting into a whole bunch of pick-up games while using (and retrieving) a ball so deflated as to be almost flat.
We played tons of those games without security ever showing up, and because Laura and I always ended up on different teams, we took to kicking the absolute s*** outta each other for hours on-end. I can't honestly think of a better start to a relationship than that, as we would be chasing that ball and shoving each other just to get possession and advance the game. She was fantastic at it, too, with a powerful kick and some bizarre dribbling that actually worked, probably because on the same principle that makes a knuckeball almost unhittable: you didn't know where it was gonna end up.
After maybe our third encounter, a mutual friend of ours came up to me and told me that she wanted to talk... and it went something like this:
Laura: So, I think you are cute.
Me: (*Gulps*).
Laura: Wanna make out?
Me: Y--ess?
And that was that.
It's all so beautifully, obnoxiously fake...
It was such an insult to everything I had ever known about romance (mostly learned from American sitcoms, movies and TV shows) that it was about perfect. And that made us inseparable in an instant, despite somewhat clashing personalities and the sheer, mutual understanding that we were running on hormones. She was really cute, too, taking to nicknaming me a million things, with special emphasis on "Hat" and "Black Hat", after the baseball cap I stubbornly insisted on wearing, thinking that it made me look cool (it didn't). She just loved yanking that hat off my head and running off with it just so we could make our best imitations of headless chickens. Being with her was just cool, and the best introduction I could have ever asked for as I took my first shaky steps into the endless quicksand of a romantic life.
By this point cellphones were actually starting to become legit, sporting cameras powerful enough to actually take pictures bigger than a post stamp without actually filling up your devise's entire storage. Games were evolving, too, although not as fast... but we didn't need them to be great, just to entertain us. And in what I hope serves as undeniable proof of how into each other we were (lol), let me tell you that we actually risked our eyes by huddling around her pink LG and played all sorts of crappy games just to have an excuse to do something, anything while we were out of the house on days so hot or so cold as to prohibit doing anything more involved than breathing.
One game we particularly liked was sort of a board game that had a neat mechanic involving shaking the phone to generate a die roll, the outcome determined by how hard you had actually shaken the sucker. It was an incredibly basic game, and one that lost all its appeal quickly, but it also gave us an excuse to do something other than complaining about the weather, so I'd say that it did its thing.
There was nothing quite like emptying one these expensive things by downloading a bunch of broken, inferior things without ever being told so due to a lack of reviews and comments on the store page.
We also had an absolute knack for getting ripped off, often downloading the worst trash imaginable from the CTI Movil Store (a granddaddy of sorts to Google Play and the IOS Store), burning a lot of credit downloading the worst possible garbage, like renditions of famous songs to use as ringtones (I swear they made "La Camisa Negra" on Mario Paint) and demos disguised as full games without ever telling you so. We once got into an argument because I downloaded one of the Derek Jeter games for my phone and it was so poorly made that it ended up requiring me to take the battery out just to forcefully reboot the whole devise after it inevitably crashed, which meant that I couldn't get her texts or calls while the stupid thing had frozen my entire phone. It was the nerdiest of lovers' quarrels.
Believe it or not, I was even more of an unfiltered nerd back then, and so I'd always gosh about whatever had caught my eye the day before, often bringing up new games I wanted to play or developments that looked mind-blowing to me, all whilst fending off against Laura's attempts at hat-napping. One particular game I couldn't wait to tell her about was a quaint little thing called "Miami Nights 2", an offering by mobile game juggernaut GameLoft that had just been released a few days prior and that I got installed on my new Sony Ericcson almost as soon as I got it.
Laura had the patience of a saint, and often played along with whatever nerd thing I wanted to show her just to see more of that goofy smile that had somehow found its way into her heart, but even her was into this one. It looked pretty damn ambitious for a mobile game and played quite well, too (both unexpected things at the time, at least for us). We would often stare at the screen, straining our eyes just to read the minuscule text and deciding what to do next, generally picking fights (and losing them) just for a laugh. We had no interest in beating the game, but ended up doing so because it was something to do, and we liked the cartoon-y graphics and the
endless trivia that made the loading screens more bearable (the bit about Miami not having a subway system has lived rent-free in my mind for decades). But, of course, this game shared the same fatal flaw of all mobile games at the time: it was just too damn short. We beat the main story in maybe three days, and only because we played maybe an hour each time. We could have probably extended our time a little by doing a "victory lap" (since the game allowed you to keep playing after beating it) or going "dwarf-hunting", but we weren't into the collect-a-thon kind of gameplay and it felt quite pointless nonetheless.
Strangely, this was the only game we managed to beat at the time, despite playing a bunch of things together. I guess we really enjoyed our real-life misadventures just a tad more.
I guess it's human nature to try to find meaning on every single thing, always trying to tie up all loose ends neatly and fileing the whole thing into a category, but that simply didn't happen with Laura. She was not only my first real girlfriend, but also my first heartbreak. We left in extremely sweet and amicable terms, but that didn't ease the pain of getting stabbed by the double dagger of "What If" and "Might Have Been". Still, I looked her up on Facebook a few days back, after not having thought about her for more than fifteen years at this point, and I'd say that it all worked out pretty well for both of us: we both have our loving families and seem to be genuinely happy with the paths we chose to follow. But then I remember all the silly things we did together, all the stupidly daring things that shouldn't have happened, all those times we argued over the most idiotic things... (like the time we went for an ice cream and the guy at the counter forgot to charge us for our bucket, resulting on me giving her a very annoyed glance when she reminded him of it; how quickly we bursted at the seams laughing because of the absurdity of it all, of me wanting to run off like a bandit and of the cashier realizing what was going on and joining in on the fun) and it's kinda hard not to be at least a little nostalgic for it. I guess that's the thing about first love, really... it changes you and gives you something to look back on, even before you realize what you are doing.
There's something deeply alluring about the fact that you (and only you) have the knowledge and the understanding to see those phantom images, to admire those beautiful memories as they play out somewhere in the back of your mind, hidden (but not buried) underneath all your present worries and obligations as the rest of the world looks right past, not even imagining the significance placed on random street corners or decaying buildings by whose shadows something truly great was brewing.
The world this story took place in largely doesn't exist anymore, and perhaps that's the final gift.
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