As a kid, I liked to think that if I ever became a Pokémon Gym Leader, my preference would be psychic type-pokémon. I was obsessed with psychic abilities and stories in all media formats of pop culture and literature. When my time came to start creating stories, all my characters had different psychic abilities, and I catalogued them all comprehensively. I came up with a categorization that would easily fit any pre-existing tale. I’ve always been a big fan of classifying information, no matter how useless it might seem.
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In real life, I was certain that dreams held the key to realistically having any sort of psychic ability. I trained myself to be able to control what I dreamed, to an extent. And there were times when I could have sworn I astrally projected to my living room. What people would call sleep paralysis, I saw as an opportunity to have extra-corporeal experiences. Needless to say, one of my favorite movies is now Dr. Sleep.
As expected, it was never possible for me to fully gain the reins of my dreams. I eventually stopped trying, and the stress and grief that have come with an adult life finally closed the door shut on my dreams for many years.
However, long before that but after the person I consider my mom passed away, I had a very vivid dream that haunted me all my life. You see, we made a pact when she was alive: if she ever died and found out there was an afterlife, she’d try her best to come back and tell me about it somehow. Without being spooky, of course.
And for all intents and purposes, that’s what she did in that dream. In the dream I was in an old apartment from my early childhood, on a 4th floor, with a friend from middle school. Suddenly, as he had to go home, I got anxious from an unexplainable sense of dread. I looked out the window and saw my mom entering the building, which I fully knew wasn’t possible because in the dream I knew she was dead. It scared me so much that I went to check if the two doors into the apartment were properly locked.
As I was approaching the door in the living room, it burst open and revealed my mom outside in the hallway leading to the elevator. She didn’t say a word and looked quite distraught. I was paralyzed from fear and was only able to notice she was holding two numbered cards in her hand: a 3 followed by an 8.
The dream ended there, and it stayed with me throughout my life. I had interpreted the numbers as the time I would join her. The age I would be when I died.
When I was nearing 20 years old, I had another dream. Two of the closest people in my life would die in an accident, way before their time. The details are not worth getting into, but they did die from cancer some 6 years later. One of those people was my brother, 7 years younger, who would come to live with me about a year after that dream. I was a wildly unprepared young adult, so my ability to be his guardian was severely limited.
There will never be anyone like my brother, and there was a time when the hole he left in my life made me unable to look forward to any sort of future. He was my one unconditional ally in the world, when it came down to it. And I was the one he looked up to the most. His loss felt like losing a brother, a child, and a best friend. All at the same time.
In his last years, his life as a high school student was chaotic. Full of vices and romantic escapades. He was good-looking and popular, which I couldn’t relate to since I was always the awkward nerd growing up. He liked old “cultured” music and mainstream music all the same. One of the bands he liked the most was the Arctic Monkeys, and while I still preferred the “Favorite Worst Nightmare” album, he was more into “AM”.
Later on, when my turn came to face death in 2019, I was only 33 years old. After my liver failed from an allergic reaction to gout medicine, I heard one song before going under and another song when I woke up from surgery. The first one was a song by Caifanes, a Mexican rock and post-punk band I’ve listened to since I was 4 years old, and the second one was “505” by the Arctic Monkeys from “Favorite Worst Nightmare”.
Both bands have remained popular and are regularly heard on the radio, so it’s not that rare that the fairly young doctors and nurses that performed the surgery were listening to them. Still, when I woke up and heard the song, I felt embraced by my brother and immensely grateful for having survived the necrotic liver biopsy and the removal of my gallbladder (which was about to burst with accumulated bile).
It was not my time yet, and my brother had made it clear with one of the last songs we shared a taste for. To me, it felt like he had been there, guiding me back to consciousness.
This episode is still very traumatic to MVisual and me. I dread the hallucinations induced by a poisoned necrotic liver and still suffer from the physical consequences. However, I am grateful that the near-death state I was in, with my body deteriorating beyond recognition, is now a thing of the past. Although for her, the psychological damage is much greater, since she was the one who fought tooth and nail to get me the medical attention I needed and cared for me throughout the ordeal. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for her, but she insists that my own determination played a part.
Despite my close encounter with death, the sense of dread from the dream that predicted my expiration date never went away. I mostly refused to acknowledge it, but there was always that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that my time was running out. Years went by and the world changed. A pandemic happened, and we were practically disowned by friends and family for being too cautious about gatherings. MVisual respiratory health is not the best, and coupled with my inability to process medicine through the liver, we were really worried that a COVID infection would be fatal for us. In the end, we learned that isolation was hard, but not the worst that could happen. We still had each other and our family of 3 cats.
People all over went crazy during and after the pandemic. Loud neighbors and rent prices increased, as well as crime in Mexico City. We took the decision to move away from all the problems that living in a densely populated area entailed, since we had already proven that we could make do on our own. That meant leaving behind our hometown and all our memories. Before we moved to the mountains in the outskirts of Querétaro to find peace and quiet, one of our own almost didn’t make it, so we had yet another intense encounter with death. In the end, we got COVID at the exact same time we moved out of the city, but we survived and reached our goal.
It wasn’t easy being isolated without close friends or family to turn to for so many years after confinement “ended”. We both had to face our own demons, and perhaps the most difficult one for me to overcome was during my 37th birthday. Sometime before, I had played through a video game by Deconstructeam, one of my favorite indie developers. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood not only changed my life, it destroyed me. And then it put me back together, as a new person.
Much like the main character Fortuna, I had my own rude awakening. Aside from the character’s story reminding me of my own relationship with my dead brother, I came to realizations that I had never considered before. It was no longer about fearing death, I actually feared life, I feared the future.
You see, MVisual and I were unable to conceive children. Becoming exiles, with no safety net to rely on, was already scary as it is. But it was playing that game, and listening to that soundtrack that the finality of it all really came crashing down on me. Everything we have, everything we are, and everything we’ve experienced will never be passed on to someone else. No nephews or nieces, no brothers or sisters, and no lasting friendships either. We are truly alone for the remainder of our lives. Because we know, deep down, that we make people uncomfortable. Our commitment to honesty, our self-discipline, and our unwillingness to fit in will always make us outcasts. I made a fit, I wanted none of it. I stared at the void and cried, screamed, and kicked my way into my 37th year. Living longer suddenly felt like the worst possible outcome.
My response could be labelled as a midlife crisis, but I’d call it an end-of-life crisis. If I were going to die, I’d at least make sure that what I did mattered. Through my company, I helped organize more community events than ever before. We relaunched our app and made plans to document the Mexican creative industries through an annual publication.
I also started getting more involved with the most important hobby in my life: video game music. Through both online messaging and in-person events, I was able to meet some of my heroes. I started interviewing artists, collaborating with them. I stopped being a lurker, and somehow, they welcomed me as if I were one of their own.
And finally, I participated in one of the game jams we organized. Inspired by our own grief and experiences, and by all the incredible games that have made their mark on our souls, we conceived a project around Día de Muertos: Cempasúchil.
After an extremely hectic year, my 38th birthday came. We wound down and decided to focus our efforts on online projects. We took our time with the Mega Mixtape podcast, producing bilingual episodes. And we worked hard on client work in order to obtain funding for our projects, including the publication.
Then September 2025 came, and I turned 39 years old. Without dying, mind you. Turns out the self-imposed prophecy, if any credit should be given to it, probably meant that I’d “die” at 33. I had just misread the numbers.
By now you must think that I’m one of the most superstitious people out there. In truth, I do not believe in psychic abilities. But I do believe we are able to perceive things beyond our comprehension. I had yet another dream as a kid, where the person I consider my mom died. Perhaps I could smell the hepatitis C, which she contracted as a teenager from a bad blood transfusion but was only diagnosed shortly before her passing. Or perhaps I could see my brother’s cancer, somehow. Or maybe I was just afraid of losing them.
In any case, my outlook on death has drastically changed over the years. I do not think they come visit every Día de Muertos. They are here because I am here, and I keep them close to my heart, and they mean something to me even when practically no one else remembers them. And I hope that through our projects, the same will be true for MVisual and me. Perhaps someone will remember us after all, a hundred years from now. Just like Fortuna and her sister’s descendants remember them for generations. Until they don’t. Until none of it really matters at all. Because now, as in today, is all we’ll ever have.
After courting death, my physical circumstances drastically changed, as was to be expected. I now have to watch what I eat and drink with greater care, and I can’t just take any medicine they give me. My bones creak when I exercise, and I struggle to keep myself warm; I lost around 10 kilograms. Add to that the fact that I usually move quietly around the house, and now MVisual jokingly says I’ve become a ghost whenever I startle her by appearing in the same room as her.
Nowadays, I find myself more attracted to ghost-type pokémon. And it’s not only because I like to joke around. I think it helps to have a constant reminder that our time here is very brief. It helps in my decision making and it keeps me focused on what matters most: the well-being of those closest to me and my own.
As for the people I’ve lost, I try to reserve my grief and melancholy for Día de Muertos. But I actually enjoy having them around, in my dreams and thoughts, from time to time. Perhaps that’s why we have decided to make Día de Muertos an endeavor that will last all year. But that is a tale for another time.
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