Starting Over – Chapter 03

My second shot at life began right at the Christmas when I was ten .
What tipped me off was the paper bag with a Super Nintendo by my bedside .
Ten-year-old me’d desperately wanted one .
“Super Nintendo . ” Hearing it now, it’s a pretty damn silly name . But at the time, it was the best toy out there .
When I first saw one at a friend’s house, I was shocked, all like, “Is it right for something this fun to exist?”
I was so transfixed on the screen, I didn’t even lay a finger on the candy they brought out .
Games were pretty expensive at the time, but my birthday was December 24th, Christmas Eve .
My birthday and Christmas presents got put together, so I did get bought some fairly expensive stuff .
I emptied the paper bag onto my bed . The dull gray system itself . The red, blue, yellow, and green buttons on the controller . Man, those were the days .
Forget thinking about this swimming up the river of time stuff, I wanted to play . Old games always had a certain charm to them .
They were limited to simplistic methods by limited storage, but that turned out to make the games more effective overall .
The paper bag had a game in it, too . Ah, of course . The system was worthless without one .
…But, you know, I had to laugh . Because the game in question was all about time travel, going to and fro between the past and future .
To borrow a term from said game, my life had been given a New Game Plus: carrying on the memories and abilities from the previous playthrough to do it all again .
And what better description for what was happening now .