My Girlfriend Saved Me with Animal Crossing

I’m not a big fan of Animal Crossing. I find the game to be counter to the two things that I instinctively look for in a video game: epic narrative and high octane action. On the other hand, Animal Crossing has a threadbare story, just enough to justify catching bugs and paying your loans.

Still, Sophie had bought me the game for my birthday. It was in our first year of dating and it was one of the first birthday gifts that she ever gave me.

I gave the game a go. Even though it wasn’t my type of game, I understood the appeal. The game has a great ability to transform mundane actions into virtual meditation. It is a ritual that makes small things like fishing or collecting shells into small, fairy tale moments. It is a slice of life offering the best slice of the wonderfully ordinary.

The real appeal for me was multiplayer. Sophie and I were 18 years old at the time, both freshmen in college. Neither of us had a car or license to close the 45-minute gap between us during school breaks.

So, we had online dates. We mostly watched movies (timing the play button at the same time so our separate streams could sync). Sometimes, we played Animal Crossing.

I vividly remember the very first night we tried. We set up the network. We each had a bottle of wine (procured through a convoluted network of friends and their older siblings). We had our webcams on and she had a glass of Merlot in her hand. My parents don’t drink wine and had no wine-specific glasses. I poured my merlot into a green, plastic cup that my family probably bought when I was a toddler.

“Cheers,” we said.

We went to her town first. She walked me through a garden, showed me her collection at the museum, and invited me to her house. After showing me her decorations, we went fishing together at a lake near a bridge. Then, we sat on a bench and screenshotted the moment.

“You know,” Sophie said, “this is technically our first date.”

I thought about it for a moment and realized she was right. The campus itself was efficient in providing institutions and education, but little else. It wasn’t connected to a college town with lively locals with things to do. It was a closed bubble, all the roads lead directly to a highway. There was the nearby town but they had long been in the slumps and cynical of the college. Rather than shape themselves around the school, they had done everything to make us feel unwelcome, even to their detriment. Dates required creativity or a car.

“Well, cheers to that,” I said. We touched our glasses to our webcams, a digital toast.

We played for a while longer when I received a phone call.

“What are you doing?”

It was Allie, a friend from high school.

“I’m playing Animal Crossing.”

“Well, come out and hang with us, loser.”

“Where?”

“The elementary school.”

It was common for all of the local high school kids in this neighborhood to meet up at the local elementary school after sundown. The school had trailers in the back that were easy to climb and acted as walkways directly to the roof. It was a giant playground for teenagers. A lot of my friends had their first kiss there. I had my first drink there at 17. The last time I was there, some of the kids had found an old mattress at a nearby dumpster. They dragged it up the roof, then dropped it into the courtyard, right into the pond. I didn’t participate but I admit I enjoyed the spectacle.

“Nah, I like where I am.”

“Come on, don’t be lame.”

“I’m good,” I said.

“All right, I’ll see you later then.”

We hung up.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“It’s okay.” She was smiling, making me smile.

We played for a bit while longer. It had become night. We decided to switch gears and check out my in-game town.

“This place is a mess,” Sophie said.

“I know.”

She started picking some stuff up and moving stuff around. Her character walked up to my own and gave me something.

“Happy Birthday,” she said to me.

It was a wooden bench. We placed it by the beach and took several pictures together, under the digital moon. That night, it was carved into a crescent. Its reflection shined down upon us. We spent the rest of the night sitting on that bench and talking. We finished our wine and told each other how much we loved one another.

The next morning, I woke up to a text message.

“We got arrested last night,” Allie wrote.

Of course, she was joking.

“We’re not joking dude. Cops showed up at the school.”

The school faculty didn’t think the mattress in the pond was as amusing as we did. Cops had been staking out the place for quite a while.

As a writer, I can’t help looking at life as if it were a story. Realists will tell me that it is all a coincidence that simply benefitted in my favor. That is probably correct but this lack of wonder doesn’t work with my worldview.

After all, the present moment is the objective reality for only an instant. After that, it is a memory, itself a sort of dream. In this dream I have about a man saved from his decision to spend all night with the person he loves, I’d like to think that fate weaved this moment for us together. It is a sign, a foreshadow, subtext, and destiny carved into the story of my life.

I’ll be 26 this year. I have graduated from college. I can drive now. I haven’t talked to, seen, or heard from my high school friends in several years. I’m certainly not throwing mattresses off the school rooftop.

But I’m still with Sophie. We share a small apartment with a bedroom and an office. Now, we watch movies together on the couch and drink wine out of actual wine glasses (and not out of a plastic cup).

I don’t play Animal Crossing anymore. Again, it’s not my style. However, I do like to watch Sophie play. Every once in a while, I sit down on the couch and she will show me all of the new additions that she had built since then.

A while ago, as she went on about all the changes in her virtual town she made or planned to make, I couldn’t help but look around our apartment. Little bits of her things and mine gelled together on the tables and walls. My film posters were being lit by her lamp. The LED statue she bought me was near the candles that I bought her.

Above our bed, there are two paintings that we made one Saturday when we watched a Bob Ross episode. Two ocean wave crashes onto two rocky shores. Hers has a softer touch, smoother at the edges while mine is more jagged and sharp. Still, there is a cohesiveness, as if they are two parts of the same piece. Like a Diptych, they are designed to be presented together.

Perhaps, my lack of interest in Animal Crossing is because it can’t offer anything better than what I already have. I have long since acquired the best slice of life.