Nostalgia

Sometimes I think about the phrase "you can never go home again". It's simple, and beautiful. I have interpreted it in many ways but the one that I want to share today has to do with what I like to think of as home.

As a child I was obsessed with Pokemon. I was something of a fanatic for the anime. I didn't have an internet connection back then so my experience of it was just the TV anime airing on cartoon network after school. I was para-socially enjoying their adventures like a silent fourth human member (OG's remember Misty and Brock).

I don't have a lot of memories of this time, it's all blurred together into a soup of happiness, because honestly it was one of the times I was happy as a child.

The other way I would experience pokemon was through the Pokemon playing cards. I never knew how to play it and I just stared at the cool drawings and read the flavour text, taking it all in, and learning how to draw the same design on A4 sheets of paper with a pencil.

There is a fun fact about Pokemon for those unaware. The Generation 1 of Pokemon mentioned several real world locations in our world, this was also carried over into the card game. Obviously when I was a gullible child it fascinated me that there was this hidden world of trainers and pokemon battling it out where I couldn't see, and I would imagine that one day that would be my job. It's fun to look back on childish innocence.

All this was before I knew that there were actual games, so you could imagine my surprise when a friend brought out a Gameboy Advance and showed me Pokemon Fire Red.

Then I found out about emulation and for a while GBA games were my sanctuary. I didn't have an Internet connection or a good enough PC to play most games, but GBA was what I played as a young teenager after coming back home from a day of school.

Home is no longer home

It's been a while since then, but occasionally i think about starting up a playthrough of Pokemon Emerald, or even try one of the amazing rom hacks which really push the boundaries on what's possible in GBA emulation, but for some reason or another I just am not able to do it. Being a responsible adult will always take priority, but hopefully some day I get enough time to experience this properly again.

When I was a kid, every adult told me that I would eventually grow out of all these things. I don't understand this fascination with killing joy in children. I would never do something like that, because childhood ends at some point and the things that fascinated everyone as kids is suddenly seen as cringe or lame.

I might not have the time now to play these games but I don't think I will ever forget the times I spent rushing home to play some Pokemon, but even more than the act of playing it was just hanging out as kids talking about pokemon rumors like how to get a black Charizard on the moon, or how there was a Mew for sure under that one truck.

That magic, or sense of wonder doesn't really exist anymore when every line of code and asset of a game can be data mined. I guess I am grateful I got to experience something pure like that.

So yeah I don't think I will ever be able to go home again, but occasionally when I hear the soundtrack randomly being played in the background of some youtube video I get a small sliver of home.