Rummaging through my cupboard today, I found stiff, crackly papers almost a decade old. My old compositions, written in a pained cursive scribble; punctuated by spelling mistakes.

At the end of almost every piece was:

"Check your spelling!"

"A good attempt, but mind your spelling!"

"Check the spelling of the words you want to use!"

Xo hear ai em todae, xtil xpeling rongly.

As I read piece after piece, the aged muse that brought me along those flights of fancy years ago hobbled up to me again.

I realised that in every piece of my writing, someone died. By car, by wild animal, by drowning, by gunshot...

The muse seemed to cackle as I envisioned my disturbed younger self penning down these morbid thoughts.

Video game violence indeed.

I remember how I threw all those hours and hours away just killing my way to more power so I could kill more efficiently (wah! I had to use the spell checker on that...). The little benchmark for satisfaction was that the enemy that I could kill in two hits should be killed in one. Then the next incarnation of the enemy would come out requiring three hits...rinse and repeat.

I can't even imagine what I missed out on during those years.

Apparently this kooky morbidity somehow struck my teachers as 'maturity' (kids shouldn't be thinking about death). Strange. I should have been sent for counselling or something, really.

Now just look how I've turned out.