checkpoint
I don’t much care for video games, but I’m married to someone who does. Marcus seems to favour the kinds of games where he’s part of some sort of space military detail that has landed on a planet, and his mission is to scour the planet to plunder various resources, and do so before all sorts of individuals of the indigenous population kill him and his crew members. (This, of course, hints to me of colonialism and exploitation, but that’s a topic for another time. Ahem.)
Occasionally when he’s playing I’ll watch, and I notice that as he’s exploring the planet, moving from treacherous scene to treacherous scene, occasionally the word “checkpoint” will appear on the screen. As I understand it, it’s sort of a signal to the player that he’s “leveled up” — that in the event the indigenous population is successful in defending their home planet from his uninvited invasion (coughcolonialismcough) and Marcus dies, when he goes back into the game, he won’t have to start at the beginning again. Instead, he’ll re-enter at the “checkpoint,” with all of the skills and knowledge he’d attained in the game prior to his death. The checkpoints usually happen right after a skill is mastered, and right before encountering a new challenge or area of the planet.
While life isn’t a video game and if we die, we can’t re-enter where we left off, there are times when it feels like we pass through checkpoints: moments when our experience is finally embedded in our bones. There are big checkpoints — like graduations, or starting a new job, or becoming a parent — but I feel like there are subtle checkpoints as well. (One that oddly comes to mind is when I week or so into my freshman year of university when I was still seventeen years old, lying on my dorm room bed and flipping through Seventeen magazine, it suddenly occurred to me that I had outgrown the publication, and that now that I was in college I wasn’t their target demographic anymore — even though I was actually seventeen. Like I said, some of the checkpoints are subtle.) The thing about checkpoints is that it’s not always entirely clear that you’re coming up to one — no ominous music starts to swell as it does in the video games. There aren’t any overt signs. Still, sometimes, you can sense it.
Right now, I sense a checkpoint coming. It could be because in a few weeks our family will be fully vaccinated against the virus. Or that Alex will soon be finished with her junior year, and in less than 6 months, she’ll be starting her final year of high school. It could be lots of things.
But something different this way comes.
Checkpoint.
Soundtrack: So done by Alicia Keys featuring Khalid
a reminder of cadence.