“Holy shit.” Your mouth is agape, eyes locked on the half of my monitor that you can see from my oddly-angled phone camera after watching me almost fall for one of Super Metroid’s tricks. There’s an E tank flashing at the end of a blue-tiled hallway, and as I run forward to claim this treat, Samus falls into a hidden pit with a collapsible block that traps her at the start of a multi-room loopback. But I never see the start of that loop. The moment Samus hit the block, habit kicked in and I jammed the jump button, launching her out of the pit and toward the tank. I had outplayed the game, if only for a moment, and I impressed my speedrunner girlfriend doing so.
“You shouldn’t be able to do that!” you say sincerely, your voice squeezing with glee. Pride warms my chest and giggles frothed from my wide smile.
“Shouldn’t” is a word rarely associated with Super Metroid. Planet Zebes is a glitch hunter and speedrunner’s paradise. If you can think about doing something, chances are a skilled enough player can do it. I’m not very good at the game, not yet anyway, and a large part of the blame goes toward the SNES controller, which feels foreign in my hands. I am staunchly of the belief that old games are old; the floatiness, the jank and lack of autosaves only further reinforce that I am not built for this era. But each time I die and lose progress, sometimes an hour or more, each time I overwrite my save data trying to create a new save state and load the old one instead, I keep coming back. Super Metroid is your favorite game. Delving deeper into Zebes brings me closer to you.
Art cuts to the core of who we are as people. Our favorite songs, movies, shows, plays, books, paintings, food, video games leave indelible marks on our personalities. Art is often reduced to entertainment, time wasted in our hypercapitalistic society that’s obsessed with productivity and efficiency. But life blossoms in the breaths between grunted exhales. Love flourishes. I want to know how you waste your time. I want to know the junk food you seek out when you need comfort, and I want to know what song is a cry for help when played on repeat. Art is the skeleton key to our souls, a surefire way to connect with someone new and skip through the hassle of small talk.
Let me explain why my favorite Ryan Gosling characters are pathetic and whiny. Let me show you 30 Rock and Arrested Development and Spongebob so you can understand my references better. Let me play you the sound of true romance, one headphone in my ear, the other in yours. Let me lend you my favorite book, please do not bend any of the pages, so we can talk about it for hours. Let me watch Godzilla and Japanese pink films, listen while someone rambles about birds or tarot or Sonic the Hedgehog. Let me let you in. Please let me in. Let’s warm ourselves in spitfire conversation and inane jokes, and if it’s still too cold, huddle closer to me. My arms are always open.
There’s something about the gloomy exploration of search-action games that encourages collaboration among my friends. Our group chat activates the second Hollow Knight: Silksong releases, each vague update about my friends’ journeys through Pharloom pulling me briefly out of my inebriated isolation. I meander through Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights for a crush, use each new boss encounter as an excuse to text her more and more until a mutual crush develops. When Animal Well released, my best friend and I spent hours parallel playing. Much to my then-girlfriend’s chagrin, we wouldn’t stop talking about the game, hours wandering Boston asking one another: did you know you can bubble jump? Did you figure out how to deal with the wolf? What the fuck is the kangaroo doing?
It’s painful to look at the few unsolved mysteries in Animal Well because they’ll remain that way. My best friend and I played it together, and we haven’t talked in months. He moved across the country. I hurt him and in turn he hurt me. There’s a chasm between us now that can’t be easily leapt over with a bubble wand or a frisbee, and it will only grow as our lives grow in different directions. Our time apart may be brief, it could be long, forever even, but I know that somewhere in the Well, our little blobs are gleefully hopping around together, desperately trying to uncover the riddles that we couldn’t decipher ourselves.
The inherent danger to sharing yourself with another person is that bittersweet pain will dampen the burning coals of warm memories until all that’s left is charcoal and steam. In grief, art that I once loved becomes radioactive. I find myself sometimes wishing that the memory wiping machine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind existed. If I could just untangle that person from my life, I wouldn’t hurt so much. I could interact with the world lighter, less burdened by nostalgic memories where joy pollutes with pain. I wouldn’t read the same books or listen to the same music or even write the same way, but I also wouldn’t feel so empty. I wouldn’t be me, and that’s refreshing sometimes. Let me become someone else with different memories and different pains, and let me overwrite those too when it all becomes so much. Let me savescum real life, abuse those save states and roll back the clock before things got so fucked.
The whole point of Eternal Sunshine is that the machine doesn’t work, that we will always find our way toward the people who shape us through love and heartbreak. Joel and Clementine ride the train to Montauk again, say hello again, and all horrified viewers can do when the credits roll is believe that this time it will turn out differently. But it won’t. We will always seek out becoming. We will always seek out those who sculpt us in their image, clay imprinted with the fingerprints of a dozen creators. Art rests in each ridge and bump.
When I can no longer talk to someone, I feel haunted by memories, their specter summoned with a song, a film, a book, a handmade hoodie with “I Love You Always” embroidered beneath the neckline. I can only wonder if they are too. I do not know how to live with this fear and pain sometimes, and I wonder time and time again if it is better to go it alone. To explore the ruins of myself armed with nothing but self-knowledge and patience to find something that no one else has found: the blighted root that poisons me with problems. It’s only after I eradicate my defects and return myself to equilibrium that I can turn my attention outward again.
Samus does not have problems like a broken heart or a late rent check. She’s mortal, but tough, scrappy, smart. Her vital organs are protected by thick red-orange armor, her emotions by her stoic demeanor. She thinks on a universal scale. She does not (entirely) stop the Space Pirates for petty vengeance, but for the safety of the galaxy. She survived Zebes before and knows she can do it again. There are more biomes now — a swampy forest, volcanic caves, subaquatic wastelands, a literal ghost ship — but their diversity does not change her mission. Explore thoroughly. Find the missiles and super missiles and power bombs to open the red and green and yellow doors. Find the suit that insulates against extreme heat. Find the beams that charge, split, freeze, phase. Follow her gut, and the level designer’s invisible hand, and upgrades will arrive just as she needs; exploit gadgets and claim whatever she wants whenever she wants. She destroys Kraid and Phantoon and Draygon, the monsters imposing chaos on the ecosystem. She wrecks Ridley again, each laser and missile blast serving as continued punishment for killing her parents. She faces Mother Brain with every power-up and energy tank, and no matter what, she fails.
She will always fail.
Mother Brain pulls out her rainbow beam and devastates Samus, bringing the hunter to her knees. Health dwindles down. Ammo depletes. Her suit beeps furiously, fearfully. There is nothing Samus can do to save herself. A high-pitched scream wails through the battlefield as a massive Metroid, the grown version of the baby that Samus spared at the end of Metroid II, flies in. It latches onto Mother Brain, syphons out a massive amount of energy from the thrashing beast, and injects it into Samus. Mother Brain destroys the Metroid, its viscera and, potentially, its spirit absorbed by a furious, superpowered Samus. Flashing rainbow, Samus lets loose rainbow death beams out of her cannon. She tanks attacks, each projectile chipping away a bit of health and none of her resolve.
Only now can Mother Brain be defeated for good, her decapitated head dissolving into dust and initiating a self-destruct sequence for Zebes. Samus never gets the chance to mourn for the death of this being which bonded to her and helped her despite her killing its entire species. Racing to the surface as the planet collapses beneath her harried feet, Samus knows she can never repay the Metroid’s naive, animalistic compassion in full. She must carry this burden with her for the rest of her life. The Metroids are truly, finally extinct. In mere minutes, Zebes will be reduced to chunks of scattered earth floating in space. At least, if she deviates slightly on her path to her ship, she can save the motley collection of animals who helped her throughout Zebes. That’s a good start.
No animal can ever stay truly alone.
How many more times, I wonder, can I watch Whisper of the Heart with someone new and have it still be meaningful? What about Lars and the Real Girl and Sleeping with Other People? Dog-eared books until they fall apart, rutted albums until they scratch? How many more people can I let into my heart, because it is well-trodden ground at this point. I worry that no one will be able to find anything new in the ruins of my past.
“You shouldn’t be able to do that!” You, who taught me, over a tedious half-hour, how to mockball to get Super Missiles early, applauding so sincerely I blushed (even if I later led Samus to her death with the technique). You who sleepily guided me around Brinstar in search of the Charge Beam, misleading me toward three different power-ups instead. You who raced through the game alongside me on Discord saying proper nouns at such a speed that I struggled to imagine how fast Samus was moving on your screen. You have seen so much within Super Metroid, played so much yourself, and yet I managed to show you something new. That feels like a miracle.
And god, if you are listening, I do not know how many of these miracles I have left. I do not know how many times I will have to cross the ocean to see the woman I love, and I do not know how many days we will have together. I do not know if one day this essay will be the bittersweet remnant of a beautiful moment in time.
I know what I hope for, but those are dandelion seeds gently riding the breeze. I know god is not in the business of wish-granting and dealmaking. I know that fear may make me stupid, but it also tells me what is important to me. When I am scared sharing art with someone new will dilute its specialness, that is because I want it to be important to them too. When I am scared of being close to someone, it is because I am scared of loving them too much. And when I am scared that you, my love, will leave, it is because I want so desperately for you to stay.
I’m trying to leave the same fingerprints on you that you are on me.
Micaela Deitz is a freelance writer and editor dedicated to thoughtful criticism, union reporting, and almost getting sued by CEOs. She is also the Editor-in-Chief/Founder of Dangerous to Go Alone, a bimonthly web magazine focused on the intersections of humanity and games. Follow her on Bluesky.