At about 8:45 pm on July 6, 2016, my brother, who is 17, rushed over to my room and banged on the door. I was getting undressed and about to go take a shower when he said the words:

"Pokemon GO is out."

Immediately I got back into my clothes and opened the App Store. I designed my character (I call her Raven; she has blue hair), and within a few minutes my brother and I were outside, barefoot and running around our yard, trying to find Pokemon. Within a few minutes, I caught my first one: a Bulbasaur, an extra small one at that. In a truly beautiful fashion, both of my brothers caught the other two Kanto starters: Carmander and Squirtle.

Soon enough, my brother and I were running along the streets, trying to catch Pokemon and find as many Pokestops as we could so we could stock up on Pokeballs. That night, I went to bed thinking about a conversation my brother and I had with our mother earlier that evening at dinner:

Mom: Come on, something has to make you feel like a kid inside.

Brother: *shrug* Nah.

But when I saw the smile on my brother's face the moment he caught a Wurmple in the middle of our street, I knew my mother was right. There was something that made my brother feel like a kid inside: it was video games.

As children, my brother and I weren't allowed to watch Pokemon or play the games. It was too violent, my mother said. Instead, while she was gone, we would watch the show when we got the chance. After a few years, my brother got a DS for his birthday, and his first game was Pokemon Platinum. I didn't have anything to play it on, but I would look things up for him on the computer. I'm pretty sure that 10-year-old me had at least half of all Pokemon at that point memorized. I became somewhat of an expert, even though I had barely played the games.

Later, when our parents split, my brother would smuggle an old TV set into his room at our father's house, and we would take turns playing Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for hours. When one person played Zelda, the other played Pokemon.

My first Pokemon game was a bootleg version of Pokemon Emerald that I got on my laptop for school. I was maybe fifteen. I beat the game in less than three weeks just by playing in biology class with my friend Josh instead of working on our assignments.

As we got older, my brother continued getting games, and I acted as his Pokedex, telling him where he could find certain Pokemon or items or what to do when he got stuck in certain gyms. When he finally caught Ho-Oh in Pokemon Heartgold in the car on vacation, I high-fived him.

For my brother and I, Pokemon was what made us feel like kids. It was an adventure for us, finding these creative looking beasts that we could name and level up and grow connected to. With Pokemon GO, those of us who grew up playing Pokemon on our Gameboys and DS's have something new to play with, something wild and beautiful, and that is seeing Pokemon in our own backyards. It's every kid's dream. Most of us Pokemon GO players may be adults now, but we still need something to remind us that we were kids. We are kids.

And we gotta catch em all.