Meet Me In This Moment

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I was joking when I tweeted this the other day, but I wasn’t lying. I’ve been playing a lot of Metal Gear Solid V lately, and if there’s one thing about the game that I love, it’s the way that, in between missions, I can just sit in the helicopter, listening to “Kids In America” or “Take On Me” or any other cassette I’ve swiped from a boombox at a Soviet outpost in Afghanistan, and do nothing. As I sit there, I feel grounded in that spot. “This is a thing that is happening.” 

I can look at the photos taped to the interior of the helicopter, and I can think about how “Take On Me” might conjure memories of early MTV and later of California college dance parties for me, but Western pop culture is an unstoppable force, and these songs almost certainly were also listened to on Sony Walkmans and boomboxes in Afghanistan in the early 1980s. It is a moment away from all the overblown absurdity of Metal Gear. It is simply a moment.

It is rare that a game makes me feel as grounded in a moment as MGS V does when I’m just sitting in that helicopter. Always it’s the combination of a song, and some memorable atmospheric or environmental detail, and the opportunity to do nothing but just sit there and inhabit the moment. 

It’s sitting in a car in the rain in Liberty City while “Fade Away” plays on the radio. 

Water on the windowpane
Distorts her pretty face
She feels that’s what she looks like every day

Streetlight fills her empty room
Dark, cold and lonely
She goes back to her bed to try to sleep her nightmares away

One day she’ll have the courage to do what she wants to do
End her life of misery and for once be happy

It’s laying in bed with Chloe in episode 3 of Life Is Strange, choosing to just be there with her in silence, listening to the entire Bright Eyes song and feeling the sunlight streaming in through the window.

And I know exactly why these moments have such a power over me. I recently read this Brain Pickings about the director Andrei Tarkovsky, in which he’s quoted as saying, 

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience — and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer.

That’s what these moments offer me. Time. Time lost or not yet had. Moments of stillness and simply being that stand out from all the activity, all the sneaking around or stealing cars or using superpowers. Moments that are mine, that I inhabited, that I lived, and that I can take with me.