As a child, I hated the long summer afternoons with nothing to do in the scorching heat. At my aunts' house, where I spent the summer, my cousins and I lost access to our main source of entertainment—television—once the afternoon arrived.

When the telenovela marathon that my aunts enjoyed began, we had no choice but to go outside, enduring the blazing sun and finding ways to pass the time.
We wandered through the streets of my neighborhood, as forlorn and bored as we felt.

However, when I turned nine, I began to notice a recurring phenomenon that my young mind couldn't quite name. Despite the seemingly endless hours and our reluctance to leave the house, we always managed to find something that made the time fly by.
Somehow, my two cousins and I were able to conjure up all sorts of games, stories, and silly activities from the most mundane things, keeping ourselves entertained for an entire afternoon.

It's not that we were particularly brilliant or imaginative, but when the three of us were together, we became more than the sum of our parts. This synergy sparked an infinite capacity for wonder and play within us.
The summers eventually passed, but that group of three children, who wandered the streets in search of a spark to brighten their afternoons, remained together. Naturally, we all changed, and after the sweet, sugary memories of childhood, we entered the awkward stage of our lives: adolescence.

As a teenager, I loved the hot summer afternoons spent goofing around with my cousins. Summer was the perfect excuse for us to rekindle that playful spirit we once had. While we couldn't quite achieve the absolute fullness of that infinite wonder, simply being together transported us to a lesser yet still amazing version of that state.

Everyone idealizes their childhood for its unrepeatable innocence and purity, qualities that fade with time. Personally, though, the period of my early adolescence is the one I often find myself reminiscing about.
I can't quite articulate why, but I feel our relationship reached its peak during that period. Despite the typical teenage challenges I faced, everything seemed lighter when summer arrived and I was with my cousins.
Hundreds of afternoons were spent listening to my first rap albums, watching YouTube videos, and playing video games—playing a lot. It was my eldest cousin who opened my eyes to see video games in a new light, appreciating them as an artistic medium rather than just a pastime.

As an adult, hot summer afternoons are bittersweet. Every time I feel the scorching heat on my skin, hear the cicadas sing, and sweat runs down my forehead, a familiar ache resurfaces in my chest, a wound that hasn't fully healed.
The murmur of a text message echoes in my mind, along with images from the day when I lost a part of myself that lived through someone else. I have never felt death as real and close as when my older cousin took his own life.

Like a parasitic entity, a profound black miasma has settled within me, engulfing that elusive essence, that indescribable feeling that overwhelmed me when the three of us were together.
It's difficult to articulate the loneliness two people can feel when they both know they've lost a third.
The compelling battle within you as you try to forget while simultaneously keeping a memory alive, feeling as though both forces threaten to tear you apart.

And a couple of months ago, in one of those futile, contradictory, and perhaps unhealthy efforts—searching for obscure and vintage games that never left Japan, much like I used to do with him—I came across this game.
It's impossible to put into words what I felt in that moment; I simply can't fully convey it. While playing with a guide beside me and reflecting on my own experiences of past summers, I felt it again.
That limitless wonder, the profound feeling of being in a constant state of play, I felt him by my side.