while we pass on in just a few days into a new decade, my mind still reels from the past. there will likely be an article about why it’s so impossible to succintly sum up a decade like this one before the end of the year, but now, here we are. all we can think about is today.

today is a reflection of what’s happened in the past. the present isn’t a fortress or a castle or a keep, or a platonic ideal, that’s what lies in our memory. my memory is Dracula’s Castle from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. that’s the only videogame that ever measured up to the screenshots.
to a seven year old, or an eight year old who discovered it first in a magazine. later, on the internet.
the website (the castlevania dungeon) is now defunct. sometimes i still go back to that place.

i can’t trust my memory, and maybe that’s why all of the things i have to write lately are about nostalgia. nostalgia as a poison, a weapon. more often, nostalgia as a sales tool. get me to buy something i remember. the important thing about nostalgia we often forget, is it never is really connected to things. when the past makes us wistful – it’s usually about who we were, to connect with, after all, ourselves. the things, the videogames, putting together a lan party with friends two decades later, those make us reconnect with a moment. what’s most powerful about real longing is it can’t be sold to us.

i can’t trust my memory though. i can trust that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is somehow perfect. a sublime rendition of exactly how i remember it. the first chords of Tragic Prince will take me back to the first sunlit day i actually got my hnds on a copy. i’ve forgotten so much else.

often we forget that the past is imperfect. the videogame about dracula’s son isn’t the anchor to the memory; it’s just a damn fine videogame stuffed with secrets and tchotckes to collect. playing it now is just a way to reconnect with having to sit and read about it online. pouring over the silk-smooth animations of alucard hovering over the ground. wondering what it sounded like in comparison to the games i knew, or how it played.

there is another game i hold in just as much esteem. it’s called Super Metroid. a lonely space sim, a lock-em up on an isolated alien planet. alone you steer a floaty powersuit through caves and underground canyons. against terrifying aliens, you are alone.
often times i realize i relate to samus not because she’s been hurt – but because she’s one of the videogame characters that hasn’t been.

Super Metroid is connected to just as many memories as other games are; yet most of them are buried. i cannot break the context of playing and discovering the depths of that alien planet from the ways someone close to me betrayed my trust. it exists as a perfect memory: I know the layout of that planet, but like Samus, I can only see it as rocks – a challenge to overcome. the space after is blank. i never long for the hazy days of playing it, because i know what happened in those hazy days.

not for everyone but definitely for Me, this is what nostalgia often is: people trying to sell our previous experiences back to us. they try and try and try to re-make and update and re-release things to be ‘how we remember them’ but maybe we don’t want to remember them that way.

maybe i want to remember that red planet the way i remember the gothic architecture of Dracula’s Castle.

this isn’t an experience that i can say i’ve ever shared it before, but there it is. nostalgia scares me because i’m afraid to re-live what it might make me remember happened. there are no works with themes like this that force me to avoid them, no horror as deep as that bleak planet. if i ever open myself back up to the experience i’m afraid of the way i might tremble.

when i say that memory is a weapon, that we should be wary of people trying to sell us our history: it’s not just because we can’t be bought and sold. it’s something private that can’t be shared.

2019 puts the lid on a decade that was spent mining the well of videogames for previous experiences. releases and re-releases all the way down. there might be more in common with the tapestry of game history and our memory than we previously though, yet, we’re still at the same time more than what we’ve played.

we are so different from our histories. there’s a funny thing that the Metroid series tried to do – it tried to continually connect samus back to her own past. to show her frightened and afraid, but to me, that’s not what the character is. samus is inseperable from zebes the same way i am. it represents a history that’s locked away and filled with secrets. where Dracula’s Castle yearns to be explored, that red ball of rock and steel asks you if you’re sure you know what you’re looking for.

zebes is unyielding. my memory holds locked down and closed in the same way. there are times i wish its halls would open back up to me, that i could face the ghouls and haunted armors the way Alucard does. to fight tooth and nail against my own memory of what happened to me, to claim it and finally send it to where it belongs. do they hold comfort in the stained glass and marble of the castle?

the power of history is i can’t ever be the kid who spent hours on a computer in their parents living room, reading everything they could about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. remakes, re-imaginings, they don’t diminish the importance of a work. what they do is re-contextualize our relationship with it.

i am terrified of my history, because i don’t remember it. i don’t trust it: that’s a side-effect of when someone close to you exploits a bond. when they do something so vile and harmful it leaves you figuring it out decades later. the way that history changes someone when they learn it. the days in my life sometimes slip by and i find myself unable to trust those, too. anchored by experiences.

in that fog is Castlevania, is Metroid. countless books and comics and yes even anime – all the things i had to use to keep myself anchored to the world. this feeling of being a half person, of having a history that can never really be defined. to step out into the world and feel the sun on my face and having to remember if that memory was before or after it happened.

Dracula’s Castle is said to be a beast of pure chaos. it changes and redefines to new shapes – finding new ways to exploit your memory of it. the trap of our history is they can seem all-too-comfortable. my therapist helped me to stop thinking of myself in a binary of victim / opressor in everything that happened to me. the gnawing space at the center of my head reshapes my history still, a beast of pure chaos.

there is power in looking to the past. of finding new ways to do things with everything we know where there was once dead ends. we are each individually stumbling through our own personal zebes, or our own personal castlevania. one is a cavern that always seems to pull us deeper and deeper. confrontation after confrontation, never sure what we’ll find. the other invites us in warmly but proves too dense to ever truly remember how to escape.

nostalgia is not truly Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. but god, am i sick of this fucking maze. sick of being defined by it, of having to face it every time i see a face or hear a name. of calling into the shadows of the cloister and being surprised by what comes out.

this hurt and anger gets channeled into how i feel about fucking Link’s Awakening or Final Fantasy VII. of having to be so fully locked into those times in my head that they are all i have. inseparable from the past. works wholly defined by how i experienced them the first, second, third times. nostalgia is something we should be afraid of, because of the way it can cloud our thinking.

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super metroid eris

to write this i had to drive seventy sixty miles and lock myself away in a hotel. decorated like someone’s idea of comfort, it only came in an arrangement with two beds and one chair. outside, the night air filters through a humble heating unit that keeps me from freezing.

on the patio though, i can look out onto the same lights i did almost a decade ago. when i was undefined and hungry for experiences: those are things worth latching onto.
i am not the person who looked at those lights a decade ago. here i grapple with so much fear and anxiety about who i am and the people hurt because of my pain. the game over screen in symphony of the night promises us that the waking hours still beckon. they always do, no matter how old we get, don’t they?

whether the person who hurt me was family or friend doesn’t matter. we all wish we could choose the bonds we have in life, but it’s not always that simple. i still will have to hear the name and see the face and think: if i don’t remember what they did to me, truly, in full, without trembling and my brain reeling, do they?

i locked myself in this hotel hoping it would inoculate me from the alien atmosphere of my own memory. that it would be own personal power suit away from the world for just a few hours. i’m afraid of the dark and what it represents: the anonymous people who knew how young i was.

but out in the darkness i can remember the castle. i can hear the choral chanting. this all sounds so silly, but yes: nostalgia can be an island. it can allow us to reconnect with the past, with who we are: with those good things that can still be pulled up. the chance encounters with strange friends. we know we’ll have to overcome the challenge of the castle sooner or later. that no matter what shape it takes, we have to engage. i am not who i was. maybe, just for a brief experience, i can remember something vivid and normal and pure.

these works are not just about what they’ve done to us. they are how we engaged with them, how they affected the world. our personal story is just as important as the cultural one, but as these are all works made by individuals, the key to understanding probably lies somewhere within.

2010 – 2019 was a decade mostly summed up by nostalgia. we always found new ways to yearn for the past, and new technology that allowed us to do it. promises were of course made, many of them broken. a decade that rapidly changed by always looking over its shoulder to the past.

what i learned from looking inside is all of the ways the past can control us if we let it. like a vice, it’ll close and tighten around us until eventually it’s all that we have to live by. here’s hoping the future can be different, that it can be just as much defined by looking at where we are and who we are today. it may be time to let go of our castles, our alien planets when people try to sell us them.