IN THE SCREEN

I remember the moment that she died. It was like watching the angel of death decending upon her from above; his sword steeply titled; his curled grin malevolent. I stood slowly, trying to comprehend what was happening, my mouth aghast and my head all twisted and confused.
"How," I said aloud, to myself. There was no one else in the room. "How is this real?"
That vicious cloaked demon plummeted downwards, and I wanted to scream at her to move, to stand up, to get out of there. But she wouldn't have moved, either way, not even had she been able to hear me. As the tip of deaths sword first pierced her, I dropped what I was holding in my hands, my mouth now fully and completely open, my head falling forward. My eyes were locked as her torso crumpled to the ground; her soft pink dress covering her corpse like a funeral blanket. My hands went to my mouth. How could this be real?
That was when I first realized what my mother meant when she told me I had been 'In the Screen'. She had always said that, every time she tried to pry my attention away from the Playstation. I didn't mean to ignore her; my mind was solely focused on the controller in my hands, on the characters that I controlled. The day that Aeris was murdered by the evil Sephiroth in deep shadows of the Forgotten City, that was when I realized what she meant.
I had become a child obsessed with the worlds that existed inside the small square box of the console.
Running off of the schoolbus I would prepare myself to explore abandoned factories with Tifa Lockheart and the mechanical lion Red Thirteen. Sitting in the backseat of my fathers Subaru as he dropped me back home on Sunday morning I imagined only about running through the crummy, garbage filled outdoor alleyways and corridors of the metropolis Midgar City, and about blowing up their outposts and headquarters with a black vigilante who had a chain gun for a forearm. I awoke early on snowdays and stumbled downstairs, revving up the engine of a vehicle that was a hybrid between a firetruck and a tank, determined to destroy everything in my path.
When Cait Sith betrayed the clan at the end of the second disk of Final Fantasy Seven, I threw the controller as hard as I could, stomping upstairs and feeling as if I had been ousted by an actual friend. I felt total fear as Leon and Claire tiptoed through the dimly lit empty hallways of the Racoon City police station; giant plants with vines-for-arms burst through the concrete walls as hordes of shuffling zombies slowly crawled closer closer and closer.
"What are you playing?" my mother would ask from the kitchen doorway, her hands on her hips.
"Huh?"
"I said what are you playing."
"This...is...uh..." (focusing). "...I gotta...get up to..." (not paying attention to her).
"JAKE!"
"RESIDENT EVIL 2," I would shout back, just as suddenly, glaring at her with all the malice a twelve-year-old could muster.
"You are in the screen," she would say, shaking her head.
Final Fantasy VII, Twisted Metal, the Resident Evil games, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, PaRappa the Rappa, Deus Ex... these were the ultimate feastings of my childhood mind, the meaty appetizers that life served to me for my earliest creative meal. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had become obsessed with creative writing, tearing through novels like a cyclone, searching for something that would fit the violent, apocalyptic tone of the games I had grown up loving. I wrote stories about lone gunmen wandering through a horrific, machine filled vision of Earth's future. I told short tales revolving around the starving survivors of a zombie outbreak, or a pilot who accidentally flies his private plane into another dimension.
Soon this creative plague that ate at my brain began to purge itself out through my hands that scribbled on yellow note paper or typed furiously away on a computer keyboard. And always I would return to the games.
Playstation soon was replaced by X-box, and the monuments I had grown up with found their way to the dusty shelves. Now Halo 2 ruled the living room television set; its frenetic violence and small squad combat too much for me to resist. I sat on the couch leaning so far forward that my mom's little kitten had fallen asleep on my shoulders. This was a new age, now, where the game competition was growing each day.
I remember staying up for three days through a snowstorm with my friend Isaac King, as we worked our way through the dark halls and chamberways of 'Thief'. I remember Hector and Erik arguing ceaselessy as they took turns getting massacred in God of War. I broke the disc for "Call of Duty: Big Red One" after a parade of death left me more frustrated than I was when I started.
And I kept writing. Now I had ventured outside of the small margins of violence and lone heroes; I had begun to explore everything. There was a small story about a misunderstanding called 'Weight'. Then came "Cellarville", a 63-page play about two murderers in a jail cell. Towards the end of my time in England I wrote a 200 page script that I only ever reffered to as 'The Promising'. That one was just for me.
On a seemingly unending sixteen hour flight coming back from Asia I penned a very-long short story called 'Perfect Things' that was about growing up poor and white in a crime filled black neighborhood. It was the only thing I've ever tried to publish. With a combined spirit of frustration and happiness, I started to wonder about writing a book.
When I returned from England after almost three years away, the first thing I did was buy an Xbox 360. I paid for it in cash, and I must've been smiling like a fucking idiot as I stood in line at Best Buy the next day, my hands full of video games that I couldnt wait to tear into. Gears of War, Halo 3, Lost Planet ... new worlds were waiting with intriguing, open arms. My first job back -- a cook in the kitchen of a hospital -- left me thinking all through the night about the novel I wanted to write, and many of my close friends can tell you about my first failed attempt at it; a brutal kidnapping story revolving around a clever hospital escape and two psychopaths called John Vee and Aaron the Arsonist.
Many games and stories followed, and only recently did I begin to wonder if there was any correlation between the two. These days I keep the gaming to a minimum; I'm either sliding around on a jetpack, blasting away the robotic murderers of 'Vanquish'; or I'm screaming at television with a river of curse words as I once again lose to Rob Chelsea in the final minutes of a 'Madden-11' match. But I'm still writing. All the time, in fact. That's my screen, now. The one I'm stuck in pleasantly.
But I can't help but think often about that day when I watched Aeris die, a third of the way through Final Fantasy, her body collapsing like a sheet falling away from a clothesline.
Was her death the beginning of my story?