History

My brother and I have a long history of playing Final Fantasies in the back room of our parents old house. It really was their fault for building that room that allowed us to steal away from old people and hang out with uncomfortable chairs stationed in front of a wicker entertainment center with no footrests and be completely comfortable. I still have the equivalent of physical scars on the bottom of my feet from resting them on that entertainment center.

Okay, so the scars are psychological and lead me to this day to seek out footrests wherever I am.

Even at funerals.

Even if the woman in front of me is elderly. It gives them purpose, and the elderly need that, I hear.

My mother also had the habit of drinking copious amounts of white zinfandel - which - when it didn't make her irritable, made her smell like white zinfandel. My scent memory is quite strong, and I smelled white zinfandel again playing Final Fantasy IV. It was at the moment where Cid sacrifices himself for the party. Your airship is being chased by the Red Wings, because when your king has been exposed as a giant freakish turtle, you want to chase people down at random apparently.

Yes, I will explain these actual plot points in more detail, but when you explain that a giant, bald, spike - toothed turtle creature was wearing a man suit and impersonating a king, you just sound like a lunatic.

Or you're Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, figuratively. But I digress.

That big, 16 - bit kaboom that happens when you rise to the surface, and Cid falls (but doesn't die, mostly because I think they found that people were too depressed after the death of two small children in sacrifice to the cause of some purple haired, sword wielding lunatic), it reminded me deeply of the retreat in my parents' back game room.

"Haha! Fuck off! And here's a giant bomb, to seal me in my cave!"

It is a strange exercise to look backwards for trauma. It's all so generic when boiled down - adults suck, and that's why there's always a part of us that doesn't want to become one. All that changes is the severity of the sucking - and in retrospect, I had it easy.

All of my trauma at that age (and still) always seems to be in the future.