It started with a plastic castle from Fisher-Price. With little plastic knights, and a wizard, and a dragon, and a princess.

Us boys would play with it for hours. Greg would always be the black knight who saved the day.

And Lucas would always be the pirates or the white knight from a neighboring kingdom trying to invade

And I was the dragon

Or the wizard

Or the princess

But always someone who worked alone

Who had no army

No soldiers

No master to look up to

I was free.

But secretly the dragon just wanted to be loved

And secretly the wizard just wanted to help save the world

And secretly the princess just wanted to be saved.

And all these years later I still want to be saved and loved and to save the world.

 

Next it was capture the flag

A game where both teams hide a flag while the others try to find it without getting caught and put in the other teams jail. And the jail could be our playhouse or a nice oak tree, or under a bush or anywhere that was deemed suitable for the time being.

And most times I would get arrested

Because I was a little too loud

Or a little too close

And perhaps caution wasn’t my greatest skill

But I never stayed long enough to miss the game because what I lacked in stealth I gained in my ability to talk

To be distracting

To be so annoying that the other team could not see my teammate walking away with their flag

And as we got older they learned to just let me go

Because it would be better for their team in the long run

And my ex boyfriends still sees me as distracting

Which is why they too learned to let me go

And I am still just as annoying

And I am still just as talkative

But it’s because we need it

As a team

To bring each other closer together

To learn about one another

We need to speak

To throw caution to the wind

Be unafraid of what they might think of you

And don’t make the decision for them.

Before they’ve been given the chance to see you

To hear you

To really truly meet you

 

But next we got video games. From a Nintendo, to a PlayStation, to a Wii.

And we started with gauntlet, a game with characters like an elf, a wizard, a warrior, and a Valkyrie, but it was never much of a choice.

I was always the wizard

Because no one else wanted to be

And because I never particularly liked the heavy weapons anyways.

I like the idea that the real magic was already in you

That the solution to any problem was in you. Waiting to be discovered, unlocked.

This independence and yearn for discovery led me to Mary Higgins Clark murder novels and a love for reading

It led me to pursing science in high-school and again in college

And it led to me never giving up on myself

And the power I hold

In this body.

Even when everyone else had given up on this body.

 

And then there was Minecraft.. I was never great at building in Minecraft, I spent more time with dynamite than a pick axe. Destroying whatever structures I created

But what’s the point in building something good when you know it will always get destroyed.

And some lessons I wish I didn’t have to learn

And I still haven’t had a relationship last longer than 5 months

Because why stick around when the fuse is already burning.