* 3 *
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.