There will always be a door to the light.......

My father has become a more tranquil man since his mother, my grandmother, died. As a person who sees himself as the mirror image of his father more and more every single day, the subtle differences in his nature have not gone unnoticed. At first, my father questioned his own immortality in the ways other people have deemed a “Mid-life crisis.” He bought himself a Honda motorcycle. He started showing other women more attention than he did his wife. He also moved out on his own for a period of time to do what he called figuring things out.

Later on, he decided to sell his motorcycle. And he started showing his wife a whole lot of attention. He and his wife, my mother, live in the room next to me. After making a deal with her, my father started going back to church. For Christmas we all pitched in and bought him a new banjo. Much to my surprise everyone pitched in and bought me a brand new acoustic guitar.

I happen to be one of worst guitarist one could ever sit and listen to. I took up the guitar a few years ago because my then best friend Chris did, and we all wanted to play punk rock. I never got away from punk rock and guitars. When I pick one up, even if I am playing something soft and slow, I find myself beating on the thing as if I was still learning to play Nofx songs.

But since Christmas, around three times a week, me and my father sit around and smoke cigarettes and play gospel songs. We have about four or five we can kind of sort of play alright. Sometimes the chord changes throw me off because I have to listen to his banjo closely to figure out the change and that puts me a couple of notes behind him. But we’re trying.

My father is also a storyteller. I have heard so many different stories so many times I know how he is going to tell each and every one verbatim. But I still enjoy hearing them. About a month ago Will came over real late one night and we just sat around watching television. At one point, my father woke up and walked into the kitchen to fix a sandwich. He ended up sitting in a chair for nearly three hours telling the same stories I had heard my whole life to Will. Later on that evening I ended up apologizing to Will for it, and to this day I wonder why I did.

I feel sorry for my father. Not in a depressing way or anything. It’s just my generation is one hundred percent fully aware of our youth and our own mortality. We came out of our mother’s womb with a copy of Catcher in the Rye in one hand, and Simon and Garfunkel lps in the other. Through television shows like The O.C. and Dawson’s Creek we get reminded that this period in our lives is a magical time. And one day, we are going to blink and be thirty and its all over. We use college as way to prolong our adolescence.

Truthfully, I never really enjoyed Catcher in the Rye. My coming-of-age novel of choice has always been The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Where the former is about angst and cynicism, the latter is about innocence and bewilderment. But both novels share the same theme. And that theme is what is important because I have never seen such a self aware group of people as my generation. We are stubborn, and self indulgent while my father’s generation was innocent in a not so innocent time. And I can make this assumption because when my father was twenty-two, he was reflecting on the ironies of his life to my four year old self.

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I had plans tonight. The plans never went through. Tim, I do sincerely apologize for not calling you back, but I fell asleep not long after we hung up the first time. I woke up nearly an hour ago in a weird haze. I dragged myself to the bathroom to brush my teeth and realized that the fever blister I had developed the day before has now swelled a whole lot. At first I thought it was a zit, but zits don’t just randomly bleed. This is my first fever blister and I have to be honest, it’s quite painful. Here in a couple more hours, after I finish writing this I am going to go on into work just because I feel like working in an aisle while there’s no one else around. Sometimes I crave being alone even though I curse my loneliness nightly.

After I brushed my teeth I decided I needed a shower. But before I turned the shower on, I placed a towel on the toilet so I could sit comfortably and gain one level as Riku in Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories. My Sora campaign in the game is completely completed. I have filled Jiminy Cricket’s journal and beat the game with a maxed out level 99 Sora. In Reverse/Rebirth, D’s journal is completely filled and I finished off the final boss three days ago with a level 62 Riku. Now I am just going to finish up the game by leveling up Riku to 99. My total time playing right now is sixty-eight hours, and I estimate my finishing time to be seventy-five. The last time I sought out this level of completion in an rpg was the original Kingdom Hearts on the Playstation.

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I own all three of the current consoles. My Playstation 2 was the last one I bought. If one randomly mentioned that I bought a Playstation 2 just so I could play Kingdom Hearts, their assumption would be correct.

I was reading an issue of Gamepro at work one night when I saw a simple advertisement going down the side of a page that showcased Jack Skellington. I can’t remember what the advertisement said at the top, but that doesn’t matter. I was intrigued. Further research enlightened me to how this particular game was going to somehow combine the worlds of Final Fantasy and Disney. It seemed far out there, and I did sort of right it off at first, but later on, I managed to find a picture of the best box art ever for a videogame. The moon, shaped as a heart, illuminating a group of five friends, two of which being Donald Duck and Goofy, as they stand on this tall ledge of a building looking over a darkened city. The faces of each character are unusual for videogame cover art because not one scowling, or smiling, or looking intense. Donald and Goofy, they look really emotionally sad. Riku has his back turned to the rest of the group, looking what I believe to be quite shamefully at his feet. Kairi, the only girl on the cover, is sitting on this ledge looking up at the same thing Sora is. Sora is the hero. On the cover he stands above them all, looking up at something we don’t see, holding the mysterious Keyblade. What kind of look do Kairi and Sora have on their faces? Why they happen to be looking up with innocence and bewilderment.

While an advertisement featuring Jack Skellington piqued my interest in the game, the cover art amazed me. After taking in every inch of it, more than the wanton desire to play the game, I felt that this game was special. In the same way I feel that certain songs and books are tailored to my sensibilities, so is Kingdom Hearts. While the game may not be the first to tackle a coming-of-age story for a generation bred on them, I honestly do believe it is the most poignant and important.

I absolutely refuse to delve too far into how the Disney moniker pushed self-centered people away. As someone who loves the game to an extreme extent, I don’t want those same close minded people to play it. I want them to avoid it. Technical issues do exist. Read any review of the game as you will surely find people complaining about the camera and clunky combat. Those are true issues. Do they hinder the gameplay? No. Give me any game, any, and I can nitpick it to death.

From the moment I turned the game on and heard that very minimalist music during the title the screen I was hooked. The first thing one does after pressing start on the controller is make a decision based on what type of player you are. The game starts with a personal decision that influences the rest of the journey. Then the real-time combat is introduced through a tutorial that doubles as the tone setter for the entire game. And this is important to me.

The original characters in the game are young. They are innocent due to the fact they are on the verge of adolescence, not adulthood. What this means in the sense of the overall picture of the Kingdom Hearts story is the fact these characters are going to grow up. And in an issue of GMR magazine, Tetsuya Nomura stated he already had the final scene of Kingdom Hearts as an ongoing narrative in his mind. So every single game in the series is going to eventually lead up to this final scene. Unlike Final Fantasy, which will continue forever due to each game being its own entity, Kingdom Hearts has a conclusion. Does that conclusion involve an adult Sora? No one knows. But what does all this mean to the tone of Kingdom Hearts?

Final Fantasy fanboys will find comfort in the scene where Aeris asks Sora to keep an eye out for Cloud and tell him she misses him. But they are going to be put off by the fact that Sora is a young boy with hope in a world where few have it. He isn’t brooding and mysterious like Cloud and Squall. The younger gamers who are enticed by the Disney characters are going to love Sora as a hero. But they are eventually going to be put off by the typical Square melancholy and tragedy of the characters. If they do see past that, the obscene difficulty will surely get them anyways. And that is the charm and absolute beauty of the tone. It’s hopeful, yet depressing. It reminded me, as person who has moved past adolescence and into young adulthood that the period before was this beautiful time. As a person who read Something Wicked this way Comes when he was twelve, I knew that the feeling of infinite summers are coming to an end very soon and freedom would eventually turn to responsibility. And that made me an introspective twelve year old. I was hopeful for my future, yet very sad because I understood, through my generation’s obsession with coming-of-age stories that it was all coming to an end.

That is the first four hours of Kingdom Hearts. We see Sora, Riku and Kairi wanting so badly to grow up and experience things, they decide to build a raft so they can get off an island they consider a prison and explore a much bigger world. We stumble upon a hidden cave where Sora and Kairi spent many a summer’s afternoon drawing pictures of each other and sowing a seed of friendship that we automatically assume will be stronger than anything in their lives, including the hardships of their desire to take on responsibilities and grow up and have adventures. The island is called Destiny Island. It’s this beautiful place where the sun is always shining and there’s always something to do for a kid.

After we get introduced to the Heartless and set off on our adventure, after Sora accepts the responsibility of being the Keyblade Master, the next destination is Traverse Town. Traverse Town is the direct opposite of Destiny Island. The sun doesn’t touch a single street. Everyone in the town has been taken away from their world and dropped into this place. We meet Aeris, who laments about Cloud. It’s depressing and melancholy. As Destiny Island represents endless summers with those special friends we love, Traverse Town represents the harsh reality of responsibility with adulthood looming somewhere outside the realm of cars, clothes and girlfriends.

And from that point on, there is not a truly happy moment for any of the characters. Yes, Donald Duck and Goofy join up with Sora. And yes, you then start to visit worlds based on Disney flicks. But that feeling of melancholy exists throughout the entirety of the game, up to and including the ending. Will Sora see Kairi again? Can he help Riku overcome the Darkness he accepted in his heart? These are questions that are answered by the end, but not entirely. At the very end, we see Kairi, in a mysterious cave, crying as she looks at her younger self and a younger Sora as they each draw a picture of the other while laughing. But the fact is, we see Kairi alone.

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I mentioned above how The Perks of Being a Wallflower is my Catcher in the Rye. And hopefully I have outlined above well enough that one could assume Kingdom Hearts has more in common with The Perks of Being a Wallflower. In Kingdom Hearts, one visits the world of Neverland. After defeating Captain Hook, we get a cutscene of our group of heroes sitting on the top of that giant clock tower from the movie with Wendy. Wendy had previously explained to Peter how she wanted to go back home and not stay in Neverland. During this cutscene she is talking to Sora about the reasons behind her decision. She wants to grow up. Wendy and Sora are not so different from one another. And all the while, Peter is flying around the clock tower in his usual playful tone. The subtext of the cutscene was not lost on me and I found what I was watching to be so beautiful I started to cry. Kingdom Hearts, a videogame, made me cry. The story of Peter Pan is special to me in a way very few things are. Wendy and Peter are two people who love each other. Not in a sexual, or romantic way even. But they do care for one another. Except one is going to grow up and fall in love. She will get old and die. Peter Pan will not. He will never grow old. The responsibilities of adulthood will never be an idea in his mind. And that is beautiful.

I saved the game, wiped the tears from my eyes, and got in a car to go and eat dinner with my grandmother who was dieing. That was the last night I saw her alive. And that was two years ago from yesterday. I remember everything about that night because I was under the influence of self awareness. Something had moved me, and because of that I was introspective and sad, yet had hope for a future that seemed too bleak. The snow was falling heavy when we walked in to the restaurant. Few things are as beautiful as heavy snow underneath the neon glow of streetlights when one is smoking a cigarette and feeling introspective and sad. That dinner was mine and mine alone to experience.

Afterwards my mother and terribly sad father wanted to go to Wal-Mart for a few things. My little brother and I went to the electronics section and while he was looking at cds, I noticed, on the new release rack, Peter Pan on dvd. I bought it without hesitation. Afterwards I sat out in the parking lot, watching the snow fall and smoked another cigarette.

I beat Kingdom Hearts that night.

And three weeks later I went to my grandmother’s funeral where I saw my father cry for the first time in my life.

wes