Leaving the Mall in Boston–my 2014 in games and films
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.“
–James Baldwin
Books do that. But in my experience, it’s not just books that can do that. Films can do it too, and on very rare occasions, maybe even a game manages to pull it off in one way or another. And this, more than anything else, is what I needed from art this year.
—–
There’s a mall in Boston. It’s not a real place but I’ve been there with you.

(You’re not real either, but we’ve met. This is the you I’ve created in my head after playing so many games and watching so many films and hearing so many songs through the lens of my feelings about you.)
I see myself in Ellie. Inexperienced and unsure of herself but strong, denied the life she might have wanted, certainly the life she deserved, for all that that’s worth. (It’s not worth anything.)

I think I respond to films and games and songs with the openheartedness and perhaps the self-centeredness one might more readily associate with teenagers than adults. Hell, I still think of mixtapes as a valid form of self expression. And if an excuse for all of this is necessary, I would say that it’s because there’s a sense in which I, like Ellie, never got to just be a normal teenager. (Left Behind is really all about the life Ellie doesn’t get to have, which is why it moves me so deeply.)
But I don’t know if I think an excuse for it is necessary. I think that one of the most important and powerful things art can do is give us new ways of seeing and thinking about ourselves, our place in the world, and our connection to others.
In Ellie fumbling for Riley, I see myself fumbling for you. In Ellie and Riley playing games together, I see how I wanted to play games with you. In Ellie revealing herself to Riley, I see how I wanted to reveal myself to you. In the honesty of Ellie and Riley’s teenage kiss on a makeshift dance floor…
I see all the teenage dance floor kisses I’ve ever wanted and been unable to have, including the one I wanted with you.
And even though all those moments meant something different to me than they did to you, I wouldn’t give them away for anything.
But like Cassandra to my inquisitor, you couldn’t love me.

And I think of how Cassandra called my character a symbol of hope and how you called me something like that once, and how I wanted to say that was the last thing I wanted to be to you, that I wanted to be flesh and blood, touch and taste, I wanted you to make me real. But these were dialogue options that ran through my head but didn’t appear on the menu, because whether in video games or in real life, people just aren’t that honest with each other, I guess.
So instead of saying things to you, I write them. Like Violette, I write and I write and I write. I write because I feel like I must and I write because I don’t know what else to do. These things need a place to go. At least this way I have something to show for it.







Sometimes, when I feel especially (yes) isolated, the absence of love in my life gets hardened and twisted into a toothy, slippery fear that I will never be loved by anyone I want to love, that I will either need to settle or be alone.

It wasn’t the alien itself that cut me down, it was facing it alone when what I wanted was to face it with you.
But sometimes I think that I’m the alien.

Sometimes I think that I have a body that’s just female enough to let me experience misogyny and the constant fear of victimization and violence, but not female enough to let me be loved as a woman. Sometimes I think that my body will always betray me the way Laura’s body betrays her, that all I can do is wander the world alone, observing but not connecting.
But the desire for connection is too strong. I have to keep looking for it. (I’m human after all.) So I hop in this old truck and I drive away from that old Boston mall until it disappears in the rearview, and the hope that you could have loved me along with it.
I don’t know where I’m going. I get lost on the road sometimes but they say that sometimes you gotta get lost to get found. Everywhere there are reminders that I wanted things to be different…

…and reminders that you can’t change the way things are.
And as I watch that performance alone, I know that I don’t want to be alone anymore…

…that it’s the things we witness together that matter more. I want a love worth telling stories about not because it’s fraught with the excitement of mystery and uncertainty but because it is deep and true, because whether we’re in the same room together or on opposite ends of the earth, we know we’re connected to each other.
So I keep driving.
I don’t know what my destination is. I don’t even know what I’m carrying in this tired old delivery truck. But I have to hope that somewhere on this winding highway is a place where I can unload the pain and the fear I carry around but not the joy of what we shared, a place where someone waits who both shakes me up and is shaken up by me, a place where I can fumble for someone who fumbles her way back for me. Maybe somewhere down the road there’s another place, like that mall back in Boston but safer, more welcoming, where I can reveal myself to her, and she can reveal herself to me, and we can share a teenage dance floor kiss.
Maybe somewhere.

Notes
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Once again Carolyn takes something simple - the “best of 2014” concept - and turns it into a personal story that I found...
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