>>12142627My birthday party came a few weeks later and I was lucky enough to get Ruby as a gift while my brother got Sapphire. I tore through my other gifts and ran to my room so I could start playing as soon as possible. I remember rushing through the intro and finding myself in a moving truck, it hit too close to home, but at least here I had a friend. I looked over the starters for the first time and decided to go with Torchic since fire was my favorite type, he didn't disappoint. Blaziken, Breloom, and Swellow got me through that year. No matter what happened at school, they were always there for me, they were my friends.
The year ended and I started Middle School a week later due to track scheduling. Middle School was nice, I started making friends and was actually pretty happy, but then problems started coming up. My grades had started slipping and some of my closest friends ended up moving away. I buried myself in pokemon and wrestling to ignore my problems until my friend told me about Fire Red. I saved up my lunch money and bought myself a copy as soon as possible, and with that I was once again reunited with Charizard.
Charizard awakened something inside of me. He reminded me of the days when I enjoyed going to school, the days when I liked studying, the days when I would play footsies with my crush. I realized how far I had fallen and started studying again, I opened up to people, I was actually happy for the first time in years. Unfortunately I slowly lost contact with most of my friends before high school started, we tried to stay in touch, but going to different schools kept us apart and our friendships faded. By this point I was used to it and learned to treasure the friends I still had.
