When I was young and first opened up my Nintendo DS lite, the first thing I noticed was the reflection of a very happy child beaming right back at me from the unlit screen, with all my imperfections that were just starting to bother me as my mind gained consciousness. You look in a mirror and you don’t see what you want to see, you see who you are.
Woa super mario is on my screen! Awesome! I played mainly just mario for months until finally came my second game, pokemon diamond. My sister wanted nothing to do with it, content to just play mario, so it was all mine. I reset the save file because I didn’t want to play as some icky girl, ironically, and started playing through my 7th game ever and only my third RPG, after the first two final fantasy games that I played on our dad’s iphone after dinner at our grandfathers house. White mage is my favorite by the way. Every day for months I’d get home from school and start playing pokemon, I was REALLY bad at pokemon. I didn’t understand how types worked, I would write down which move would hurt which pokemon that I had to fight, and train my horrible team hours at a time, I loved them, they were my guys.
At school one day my friend told me to bring my DS the next day and he’d give me a cool egg. After I got it I spent all night walking back and forth waiting for it to hatch until eventually the coolest thing I ever saw appeared before me, a fucking eevee, “holy shit,” I thought to myself, “this is a fucking dog!” Having seen maybe the coolest thing I had ever possibly seen—and in the second twist of irony since this eevee happened to be a girl and my egg was far from cracking—I named it after myself. I looked into my bag for one of those stones my friend told me I’d need to evolve it, I figured the water stone would be useful since I could teach it surf, and then saw the new coolest thing I had ever seen. I leveled that shit all the way up to level 100, swept the entire elite four with it, I forgot about all my other pokemon, I had vaporeon now!
A mirror keeps reflecting no matter what job you give it, as it’s sole purpose is to reflect. When I was looking at those pixels, staring at that screen, it never stopped showing my face back at me. The dumb kid that I was was always pressed onto it, blending in with the game. Pixels mix with flesh, a body melts into concepts it never really could grasp before and maybe still can’t. A digital mirror showing not who you want to be, but simply who you are, on a level that mirror in the bathroom couldn’t ever begin to understand. A reflection of the soul. A picture of what you're meant to be.
It is still very funny to me that the very first video game character I ever saw myself in was a big wet dog.