Video Games Are Just Stories
& I really love a good story.
In middle school, one of my best friends was a big fan of Kingdom Hearts, a Disney-themed video game by Square Enix. Though I was a casual video game player myself—to this day I would call my red Gameboy one of my favorite Christmas gifts ever—I was never particularly grabbed by the look of Kingdom Hearts. The art style was unfamiliar to me, and though I’d played story-based games before (mostly Harry Potter themed) I preferred the simplicity of Super Mario Brothers.
This friend, who I will call Eleanor, was my first “real” best friend. The type of person you create a secret language with, all your own. The type of person you looked for in between classes in high school, and continue to remember small, weird details about for the rest of your life. On the day of my 16th birthday, for example, I know that Eleanor was on a cruise with her family, dealing with spotty wifi. She managed to send me a heartfelt birthday message through her iPod touch, which I responded to with my iPod touch. A couple of weeks later, when we reunited before the school year, she gifted me a photo she’d taken on my birthday of the sunset over the ocean. I was going through a phase where I was obsessed with sunsets—I should’ve known I’d be a poet, then—and I nearly cried upon opening it. My very own birthday sunset, memorialized forever. I still have the photo, grainy and aged, in its whimsical turtle-laden frame. Its thoughtfulness had stunned me.
When you love someone, you often have a desire to introduce them to your interests. This, too, is an act of love, to say I care about this thing, and it would mean a lot to me if you cared about it, too. Eleanor and I followed each other on tumblr, a website I dragged her onto in the first place, and they were deep in the Kingdom Hearts fandom on there. I gleaned a lot about the series from reading her reblogs and reposts, analyzing her tags and comments, but the intricacies of the plot were fuzzy to me. At the time of writing this, there are over ten games in the series—that’s a lot of plot to work through.
One summer, when we were probably 14 or 15, Eleanor hand-wrote the entire plot of Kingdom Hearts for me in a spiral-bound notebook. If I remember correctly, this detailed summary was at least one hundred pages long, and included illustrations Eleanor had printed out and pasted within the notebook’s pages. Yes, I could’ve looked this information up. Yes, Eleanor could’ve directed me to Wikipedia. But we were note-writing people. When I opened up this notebook, none of the above thoughts crossed my mind. All I knew was that this was important to her, and because she was important to me I would read it.
If you’re familiar with Kingdom Hearts, you’ll know the plot is long and a bit confusing and convoluted, but still exciting and engaging (especially for a kid). It took me a couple of months of putting the notebook down and picking it back up, but I eventually finished reading the words Eleanor had written for me. After, I had a better idea of what was going on when Eleanor talked to me about the game, and I have fond memories of watching Eleanor play it in her bedroom as I lounged beside her, laughing at the goofy jokes and recognizing the storylines I’d read in her hand. Friendship is never simple, especially when you’re a teenager, and this era of our friendship was the easiest it would ever be. Just two girls cross-legged on carpet, our eyes glued to the same characters, the same riveting story.
Eleanor and I had a falling out in our junior year of high school, one of those ridiculous fights you have when you’re sixteen, ultimately just trying to figure out who you are and where you want to go. Though we eventually reconciled after high school, had lunch a few times and caught up, we lost touch again. I forgot to answer a text here or there. She unfollowed me on social media. We both moved away and now all I have are these memories, and nobody to share them with except people on the internet.
I have thought a lot about Eleanor in the last few years. I have thought about her as I scroll through tumblr, a website that became important to our understanding of each other. I thought about her when I packed up my life and moved to Albany, my sunset photograph tucked safely in a box with newspaper around its frame. I thought about her when I met Louis Tomlinson, her favorite member of One Direction. And I thought about her last Christmas, when I unwrapped the complete Kingdom Hearts series for Playstation and eagerly loaded it onto my gaming system.
Though I grew up playing video games, and still love them now, my time to play them has decreased. I just can’t seem to find the discretionary hours that I used to spend on gaming, needing them, instead, for editing or writing or any of the other projects I douse myself in. Because of that, my gameplay has been slow. I’m still on the first game. After I finalized “Burning The Ghost Light” just a couple of weeks ago, I picked Kingdom Hearts back up. As I traipse through these Disney-inspired worlds, with Goofy and Donald Duck in tow, I feel 13 years old again, with Eleanor by my side and too much eyeliner weighing heavy on my lids.
By now, I have forgotten most of what Eleanor taught me. I’m not a great gamer, which has never mattered to me (I’m there for the story), and I find myself laughing as I struggle through boss levels I remember Eleanor breezing through as if it was nothing. The plot is new again, though every so often I find myself going oh yeah, I remember this. In high school, whenever I had a falling out with someone (twice, in a major way), I very rashly got rid of everything of theirs I owned. Every memory they were part of. Now, of course, I rue these choices. I miss the photographs I cut certain people out of, and the pages upon pages of notes I was passed in the hallway. The notebook Eleanor wrote the plot of Kingdom Hearts in has long since been recycled, and was hopefully made into another notebook, or something else usable for some other teenage girl. The girl I am now would have kept it; I feel more sentimental the older I get. I used to consider myself a minimalist. Now I relate to that often quoted David Foster Wallace line, everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it. All I know of Eleanor now is what I can see from her profile pictures on Facebook. We aren’t friends on there anymore, so these images are all I have.
When I say I love reading, what I really mean is that I love a good story. Yes, there is a magic I love about the physical act of reading, of holding a book in my hands, turning the pages, carrying it around with me to appointments and lunch breaks. But the main thing I glean from a book isn’t tangible. It lies in the language, the unfolding of characters and breaking down of big concepts into story. Every book begins with a “not knowing” that, by the final page, becomes a mutual understanding of some larger fact or knowledge. The same goes for a video game. These stories are unknowable, then knowable. Built on language, action, conclusion.
This essay, too, is a story, but the ending is pretty lackluster. I’d change the whole thing if I was writing it into a novel. I don’t know why Eleanor and I aren’t in any sort of contact anymore—maybe there is none, and we can chalk it up to the natural sort of falling away you have with people from your hometown. I don’t know why—frankly, can’t fully remember why—we had such a big falling out in the first place. But I remember the name of her dog. I remember our inside jokes. I remember sending her chapters from the secret fanfiction I was writing in high school. Eleanor was the first person to ever read a poem I’d written. Now, I couldn’t tell you if she knows I have a book out. Where would my life be if she hadn’t encouraged me to keep writing after that first (terrible) poem? If she’d said I don’t know if writing is for you, maybe I would’ve listened. Best friends have that kind of power.
I’m lucky to have found in adulthood the sort of friendships I once yearned, growing up—the sort of love people write essays, novels, songs about. I feel happy, comfortable with the number of people I keep in my life, in their various degrees of closeness. But I feel I will always wonder about what could’ve been. Certainly there is a universe where Eleanor and I remained best friends, even from afar. There is a universe where I put down my Playstation controller, frustrated, and FaceTime her to say what the hell am I doing wrong here? In this world, though I do run down the what-if rabbit hole, I am content to play Kingdom Hearts and feel grateful to have known Eleanor at all. To have been a teenage girl with her, messy and stupid with arms open wide. Even if the price of that friendship is being forced to remember it, all by myself, in the present.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Don’t forget to do your daily click for Palestine.
As I mentioned in my previous substack, “The Surrender Theory” makes a great gift for the poetry reader in your life!
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Until next time, with my top books of 2024…
Caitlin
this made me google my long lost high school best friend. best friends are indeed powerful like that :') another beautiful piece as always, thank u
this is so beautiful