Childish Diversions
Perhaps one day I will talk about why I disappeared again, but that day is not today. Instead I will talk about something that happened today that has not happened for so long. And in retrospect after it happened I never felt better.
I was waiting for a bus down at Medical Center to go home. I had just missed the bus by five minutes and now I was forced to wait until another one showed up. I was listening to my iPod when a song came up that I had downloaded from the Newgrounds Audio Portal. It was a symphonic song, believed was used for one of the games in the Dark Cut series. I was standing there listening to it and the song felt so emotionally charged to me that for that very moment I imagined myself as a World War II soldier fighting in France. I saw it, I smelt it, for that one moment in years I had imagined/pretended I was somewhere else.
As a child I did this more then I care to admit, while neither my mother or grandmother were stingy people (actually they were quite giving) for some reason I would grow bored of things and would find myself imagining myself on great and epic adventures. Sometimes a stick was a sword, a box was a ship, and when there was nothing around to hold you just pretended you had a weapon. In honesty this was how I passed the time for years, even when I was 12 years old and was riding bikes with what friends I had, I may have been there in body, but in my mind we were the REGULATORS, riding on horseback, righting the wrongs of the Wild West.
Sometimes I would keep it to myself, my daily actions somehow coinciding with what I was doing in my own little pretend world. However sometimes, afterschool, my classmates would see me after school running down the hall screaming my balls off as I proceeded to pretend hack and slash my way through whatever I was fighting that day. Most would have just shrugged it off as "pretend playing" when they were small kids, but when your 13 and still doing it... you learn quick to stop or be socially ostracized. And much like others who probably did it just like me I stopped "playing pretend", not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid what would happen if I didn't stop.
But yesterday, as the music rang in my ears like background music in a Medal of Honor game and sounds of machine gun fire and German yelling came to mind, I threw reason to the curb and for those few moments pretended to be somewhere else. Yelling at the top of my lungs, making my own gunshot noises, hiding behind cover. It was glorious, I realize that it was all in my head but for those instances I felt out of the ordinary.
And then the security guard stopped me and said I was disturbing others. Coming out of my fantasy I saw old women cowering, teenagers pointing and laughing, and even one guy just shaking his head in disapproval.
But in the end I can say one thing... totally worth it.
I was waiting for a bus down at Medical Center to go home. I had just missed the bus by five minutes and now I was forced to wait until another one showed up. I was listening to my iPod when a song came up that I had downloaded from the Newgrounds Audio Portal. It was a symphonic song, believed was used for one of the games in the Dark Cut series. I was standing there listening to it and the song felt so emotionally charged to me that for that very moment I imagined myself as a World War II soldier fighting in France. I saw it, I smelt it, for that one moment in years I had imagined/pretended I was somewhere else.
As a child I did this more then I care to admit, while neither my mother or grandmother were stingy people (actually they were quite giving) for some reason I would grow bored of things and would find myself imagining myself on great and epic adventures. Sometimes a stick was a sword, a box was a ship, and when there was nothing around to hold you just pretended you had a weapon. In honesty this was how I passed the time for years, even when I was 12 years old and was riding bikes with what friends I had, I may have been there in body, but in my mind we were the REGULATORS, riding on horseback, righting the wrongs of the Wild West.
Sometimes I would keep it to myself, my daily actions somehow coinciding with what I was doing in my own little pretend world. However sometimes, afterschool, my classmates would see me after school running down the hall screaming my balls off as I proceeded to pretend hack and slash my way through whatever I was fighting that day. Most would have just shrugged it off as "pretend playing" when they were small kids, but when your 13 and still doing it... you learn quick to stop or be socially ostracized. And much like others who probably did it just like me I stopped "playing pretend", not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid what would happen if I didn't stop.
But yesterday, as the music rang in my ears like background music in a Medal of Honor game and sounds of machine gun fire and German yelling came to mind, I threw reason to the curb and for those few moments pretended to be somewhere else. Yelling at the top of my lungs, making my own gunshot noises, hiding behind cover. It was glorious, I realize that it was all in my head but for those instances I felt out of the ordinary.
And then the security guard stopped me and said I was disturbing others. Coming out of my fantasy I saw old women cowering, teenagers pointing and laughing, and even one guy just shaking his head in disapproval.
But in the end I can say one thing... totally worth it.