Nov 21

learning to fly

i never had flying dreams as a kid. most of the dreams i remember fall into a few categories: being chased by monsters or malevolent spirits, navigating through labyrinths, disembodied heads, amputated pirates. i think maybe i was a soldier in a past life. perhaps i still am one now.

a few days ago i found myself playing super mario 64 out of the blue. i don’t know why i was drawn to it, or anything for that matter — i simply follow my innate curiosity, trusting it will guide me closer to the great i am.

i have a strange subconscious history with mario, one i never examined until today. super mario 64 was released just a month after i was born. when i was four or five, on a trip with my parents — maybe to seaworld — i woke alone in our hotel room after they’d fallen asleep. the room felt eerily hollow: thin, scratchy carpet, plastic blinds, creaky radiator humming, moonlight leaking in like cold breath. i turned on the tv and caught the second half of spielberg/kubrik's artificial intelligence — starting right at the shot of the robot woman with the back of her head missing.

it was just too shocking and invigorating to turn it off. i watched to the end, to the scene where david, the robot child, spends his last day with his mother. it was a lot to take in as a kid, specially since i was about the same age as the robot boy in the movie. i cried and cried, suddenly aware of my own mother’s mortality, even though she lay asleep beside my father as i sat on the floor, leaning against their bed. that movie can still make me cry; the melancholy never left me.

afterward, in that strange late-night stillness, i flipped through channels looking for comfort and stumbled into a proprietary hotel menu. there was a gamecube controller, and an option to boot a pay-per-hour nintendo 64.

i opened super mario 64, knowing nothing about mario, and there it was: mario’s massive disembodied head floating on the screen. his face — alive, exaggerated, moving — hovering without a body. “it’s-a me, mario!” he chirped. it was as if dr. know from A.I. had reincarnated, following me from the movie, another disembodied head from my dreams without a world to stand in. shaking, i shut the tv off instantly and crawled between my parents. i told my mom i loved her.

even now, replaying super mario 64, the game feels quietly desolate. an empty courtyard, an empty castle, silent rooms, blank walls that open into worlds that feel only half-built, surrounded by endless voids. as a kid i think i felt that emptiness but didn’t have the language for it. a lot of childhood is like that — wandering through spaces meant to be comforting but somehow hollow, half-lit, half-real. the eeriness of mario’s empty castle felt like the eeriness of hotel rooms, daycares, amusement parks — liminal places where you’re supervised but still alone.

i knew i had played the game in the past, but the context had dissolved. i also knew i’d never gotten far, because the basement levels were uncharted territory for me. honestly, i’ve probably spent more time watching other people play super mario 64 on youtube than i've actually played it myself. that disconnect — watching versus doing — feels like its own kind of dream. someone else moving through the world while you hover, bodiless, behind them.

playing it now, i pondered my own personal relationship to mario, the now-archetypal videogame demigod. who am i in all this? this little red-white-and-blue squishy guy with an “M” on his hat — a bouncy, mustached hero bursting with heart and superhuman ability. mario's proportions, his movement in this game almost feel childlike — slippery, delicate. at times, it's surprisingly difficult, most of the challenge coming from keeping mario from falling off cliffs. still, something in me said to keep going.

so i did. i jumped through paintings, delivered a baby penguin to its mother, fought bowser, got the basement key, drained the basement, collected the blue invisibility cap, trudged through the hellish and swampy worlds. i've found 15 stars in the past few days.

booting up the game today, i thought: there must be something i’m missing. something obvious. and of course there was. standing in the beam of light when you first enter the castle, i remembered — if you switch to mario’s first-person view and look up, mario is whisked into the sky wearing a winged cap, soaring through rainbow rings above a floating kingdom.

and suddenly, like magic, i was flying — like i was ten again. i didn’t need flying dreams, i could fly in mario’s dream. it all came back. that summer my mom dropped me at the daycare in her gym. they had a nintendo 64 there, though curiously no physical activities for kids that i can recall. the games were super mario 64, banjo-kazooie, glover, gex. a kid once illuminated me to the secret of flight in mario 64, and from then on, every time i played, i went straight to that beam of light. flying was the whole point. the rest of the game barely mattered.

twenty years later, trying to collect eight red coins to get the secret star in that sky world, i realized flying in a video game isn’t so different from flying in your mind. if you can’t fly mentally, how will you ever do it physically? and what good is flying to another kingdom, another country, another world, if you can’t fly right here, right now?

something else struck me each time i missed a coin or plunged out of the sky. flying is delicate work. a slight tilt throws you off course; mario speeds up as he descends, and if he dips too low, he can’t climb back up. and yet, no matter how many times i fell, i always got another chance. mario may yelp as he falls to his death, but he’s always ready to try again if i’m willing to guide him. funnily enough, he still casts a shadow at the bottom of the skybox.

that, i think, is the hidden lesson. life is a game that gives you infinite attempts — infinite lives to “get it right,” to “earn the star,” to follow whatever your heart is reaching toward. video games taught me persistence in an instinctual way: to sit down, commit, focus, imagine, ride the whole arc of frustration and satisfaction. funny how my favorite games as a kid were platformers — rayman, sonic, kirby, earthworm jim, vectorman — worlds where all you do is run, jump, swim, and fly through bright impossible landscapes.

i'm deeply grateful for these pixelated cartoon avatars, who taught me to keep smiling even in the face of certain death, even knowing they’ve died countless times before. maybe that’s all i’ve ever wanted out of life: to fly freely and feel it lift me up, up, and a way.

after about half an hour of dying and resurrecting in that floating kingdom, i finally got the winged cap star. for now, that feels like enough.