Tag: death

#oneaday, Day 137: Flower Girl

I am almost falling asleep on my keyboard here, so I’ll keep this brief to prevent falling asleep with all the letters of the keyboard printed backwards across my face. I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m not sure why I’m so tired, though I have had people over this evening and I spent the first part of my day cleaning up in preparation for said visitors. We had a lovely evening, by the way, thanks for asking.

Earlier in the day I did get a moment to record one more piano piece. I posted it on Tumblr earlier but I’m not sure who got the chance to hear it. A few people did, I guess, and it even got a couple of reblogs. But I thought for those people who don’t “do” Tumblr, I’d post it here too.

The song in question is Aerith, or Aeris, or Flower Girl or whatever you want to call it. It’s the piece from Final Fantasy VII that makes everyone cry. There are two reasons for this – one, it’s a beautiful piece of music, and two, the most memorable point of the game in which this piece of music is heard is where Aerith/s dies. (Oh come ON! Surely everyone who is ever going to play Final Fantasy VII knows that by now.) This scene is widely regarded by many as one of the first times where computer games genuinely started to encourage emotional investment in their narratives – at least on consoles. Developers of adventure games on PC had been trying this for a long time already, but Final Fantasy VII was the first mainstream console game which people admitted crying to.

It’s a cliché and a bit of a joke these days, of course, but it was my brother telling me about the sheer emotion in the game that made me originally want to pick up Final Fantasy VII. I’d never touched an RPG prior to that point and had no idea what HP, MP and Limit Breaks were. My life was shortly to change forever.

The piece of music itself, though; it’s always held a peculiarly personal meaning to me, and I can’t pin down why that is. I think it possibly may be something to with the fact that the older Final Fantasy games allowed you to rename your characters, so in my game, it wasn’t “Aerith” dying, it was someone I knew. This made it all the more traumatic.

When I play the piece nowadays, I don’t necessarily think of someone dying. But I do always find myself thinking of someone. I always feel that the character of the piece represents gentle, total, unconditional love and/or affection towards someone. So inevitably while playing it I find myself thinking of someone special to me in some way. The exact person who comes to mind has changed many times over the years, but the reason for my thinking of them hasn’t. They are important.

iPhone users, click here to hear the track. Everyone else, use the Flash player below.

#oneaday, Day 133: Lazy Days

Everyone has lazy days. Days when nothing – nothing – gets done. And sometimes there’s not even a reason for getting nothing done. Just pure laziness. Or possibly your body telling your mind that it’s quite comfortable where it is, thank you very much, and would it mind awfully if it just sat here and atrophied for a few hours KTHXBAI.

It starts innocently enough. You sit down on the sofa. Perhaps you wanted a quick breather. Perhaps you’ve just had a phone call that went on for so long that that pacing-around-the-room thing that everyone does with mobile phones got a bit tiresome. Perhaps you were about to watch some TV. The circumstances of how you got to the sofa are about to become completely irrelevant.

At some point during your blissful reverie, something of earth-shattering importance will occur to you. Perhaps there’s a letter that you need to post today, or you’re running out of toilet paper and the shop is closing early for refurbishment today, or maybe you’re out of milk, or perhaps you actually have something useful to get on with. Whatever it is, your mind can’t stop thinking about it. A feeling of lurking panic starts to set in. What if you really need to take a dump and there isn’t enough toilet paper? There’s no-one else in the house so you can’t ask anyone else to go and fetch you some. Could you sink as low as using a towel or a newspaper? Or would you want to wash your shitty arse in the shower, like some sort of incontinent old person, only without a nurse to help you with the hideous process? The feeling of panic builds and you almost feel obliged to get up.

But no! Why should you get up? You’ve been working your arse off all week for little to no gratitude from the people that you work for. So you’ve earned this little sit down. You shouldn’t feel obliged to do anything. So you don’t. You say to yourself – possibly out loud – no. You are going to sit here until you’re nice and relaxed, or at least until Top Gear has finished. Then and only then you might think about getting up to post that letter.

“But the post goes at 4pm, and it’s 3.50 now,” says your mind. “If you don’t post that letter today, the council are going to charge you eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds for the privilege of another letter asking you where your eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds owed in money that they paid you by mistake actually is.” You close your eyes and block out the whingeing and nagging that your own mind is setting about you with. This is your time. Besides, the postman will come again tomorrow, and you can always change the date on the letter to look like you posted it earlier and it actually got lost in the post and then feign ignorance when the council start hammering on your door and bringing the bailiffs round.

You decide to give up trying to be productive and you lean back on the sofa in a more relaxed posture. Perhaps your mouth falls open in an expression of gormless contentment. You stare into space for a little while as the light starts to fade outside and you wonder if you probably should get up and cook something, but you’re not sure you can be bothered. You’d phone for pizza, but you don’t have any cash, and ordering one with a debit card is always such a hassle because they always phone back and say it hasn’t gone through and you think your card’s been declined because you’ve got no money but it’s actually them just typing the number in wrong and oh for heaven’s sake being by yourself sucks and wouldn’t it be much better if you had someone to talk to or cook dinner for? That might get you up off the damn sofa.

There are only two possible outcomes to this scenario once it gets to this point:

The first possibility is that you achieve victory over the soporific powers of the sofa, stand up and get something done. You post your letter, putting it right into the postman’s hand just as he is emptying the postbox into his big bag. Then you go and buy toilet paper and milk and order a pizza. Your evening goes swimmingly well, and you collapse into bed satisfied that you have spent your day as productively as you possibly could, with a much-needed break in the middle for a little quiet time and reflection.

And the other possibility is, of course, death.