Melissa Anne
Everything I Know About Love I Learned from the X Button
the best way to beat a boss is to leave the game
for a few months and forget you ever played it
which is a tactic I have used in relationships
but in those I can never load from saved game
and new game doesn’t quite have the same taste
and that’s all I want,
just the old stuff,
but from the beginning
I started playing Dragon Quest because of a boy
and I started playing Final Fantasy because of a boy
and I bought a PS2 because a boy
and I practiced DDR at home for hours because of boys
games, so many of them
boys, so many of them
I learned how to properly catch Pokémon in Pokéballs
after a boy showed me how
with his thumbs over mine:
‘you just hold down B while it’s wiggling’
ten is a very romantic age
when someone dies in Dragon Quest your party
pulls around a coffin until you get to a church
where you pay the priest to revive them
I made sure to make my player a woman
the strongest one, the warrior
and I always made sure the men died first
because that’s how I learned about chivalry:
you lose before you win
I used to talk to a boy about how much we loved
DDR when we were younger, how the arrows
never seemed to go where we thought and how our
favorite song was Heaven by DJ Sammy
I never touched him but he is the one who taught me
to be grateful for the life I still have
in Mario Kart I always pick Peach
because someone always saves
the princess
the one thing I have always wanted is to be loved
the way Tidus looks at Yuna in Final Fantasy X
and holds her to him in the lake like they could stay
that way always, battle
no one, live
forever,
just
be
the best way to beat a boss is to leave the game
for a few months and forget you ever played it
which is a tactic I have used in relationships
but in those I can never load from saved game
and new game doesn’t quite have the same taste
and that’s all I want,
just the old stuff,
but from the beginning
I started playing Dragon Quest because of a boy
and I started playing Final Fantasy because of a boy
and I bought a PS2 because a boy
and I practiced DDR at home for hours because of boys
games, so many of them
boys, so many of them
I learned how to properly catch Pokémon in Pokéballs
after a boy showed me how
with his thumbs over mine:
‘you just hold down B while it’s wiggling’
ten is a very romantic age
when someone dies in Dragon Quest your party
pulls around a coffin until you get to a church
where you pay the priest to revive them
I made sure to make my player a woman
the strongest one, the warrior
and I always made sure the men died first
because that’s how I learned about chivalry:
you lose before you win
I used to talk to a boy about how much we loved
DDR when we were younger, how the arrows
never seemed to go where we thought and how our
favorite song was Heaven by DJ Sammy
I never touched him but he is the one who taught me
to be grateful for the life I still have
in Mario Kart I always pick Peach
because someone always saves
the princess
the one thing I have always wanted is to be loved
the way Tidus looks at Yuna in Final Fantasy X
and holds her to him in the lake like they could stay
that way always, battle
no one, live
forever,
just
be
Melissa Anne is a graduate student of international communications in Tokyo. Her fiction and poetry have been published or are upcoming in The Adroit Journal, Junoesq and Cadaverine Magazine as well as in the youth writing anthology What You Remember, What You Forget. One of her favorite phrases is “a dash of sass.”
