Monday, November 25, 2013

The Ever Enlightening Secrets of Mana.


          Growing up my favorite video game was Secret of Mana on Super Nintendo. The hero in it finds out all at once that he is special, of great importance, one of a chosen few who held such a special place in that world. That always jived with how I felt about myself, and what I wanted the differences in me to mean.

           I wanted it to mean that there was some great calling, some amazing event that I would not only partake in, but cause, drive, and, see through. Something so life changing...world changing, that the people who questioned my importance would stand in silence awestruck by the knowledge that what happened was real.

            I don't remember what I used to call him, as each time I played through I gave him a name that resembled who I was at that time, but it was me. The whole thing. His closest friends mocked him for being different, his surrogate father treated him like he didn't belong there. His real father had disappeared on some sort of hopeless quest reappearing too late to do anything other than sum up what was already learned up until that point. All of it...

            And at the very beginning of the game, as he finds out his importance he is blamed for all hell breaking loose, charged with fixing it, and banished from the only home he'd ever known.

"Have everything you need?"
[Yes]
"You are hereby banished from Potos village. Now get out of here!"

            This has been a recurring theme in my life, as I'm sure it is in many other peoples. Different lives, different friends, different surroundings.

" But time flows like a river...and history repeats."

           I've been banished from Potos more times than I can count now, and I am currently recovering from the most recent. My home, my family, my world once again taken from me, and I can never go back. These aren't just words. Sometimes it kills me inside so much that I have to remind myself that I can't get back there just to put to rest the possibility. It was so bad that for the first 4 months I had to convince myself it was true as I woke.

            My family recently shattered. My surrogate father no longer a part of my life. My original father present but too late to do anything but narrate cohesively what I already know to be true with some questionable variables. My home left behind. Banished from what I knew. again...

            But in the game none of the hero's importance, none of his significance comes through until he is banished from his home unable to return.

            So tonight I was hoping. That this...this is when mine comes through for me. I am in a new job that is enabling me to move on with my life, with the woman I love whom I hope to have a family with, and break the curse as a father that I endured as a son. Now that I am out of the reach of my surrogates father's negative perceptions of me I am slowly realizing my potential, my worth, and my place in a world where I may or may not belong.

            There is nothing about me that is normal, or believable for that matter. All of the things that make me up seem like they could be made up by an overzealous writer who's biggest flaw is writing characters with too much going on. It's like I don't exist, sometimes it's like I shouldn't, but what I'm starting to realize is...

            If I am real...and what I say is true...if what I can do lives up to even half of what some of the people around me think I can...then I must be destined for something. Something much more than I have ever given myself credit for before.

            So now here I am in a place somewhere between the pain of leaving Potos, and the knowledge that I am on my way to something more. Where I will go places, meet people, and do things I would never have the courage or honor of doing if I hadn't been given the benefaction of being banished...from a place where I was just...that weird kid in Potos wondering why I was so different, and waiting for some sign of my own importance.
  
 So I guess for that I should thank you.
so...thank you. 
Now I'm off to find my Mana Sword.
-thatonewolf



Soundtrack part 1:
Soundtrack part 2: