To save in SILENT HILL 2, lovelorn James Sutherland needs only to gaze into an ominous red square on the wall and press X:
I believe at one point he says something about them making his head hurt, or like he can feel something touching the inside of his mind, or some such thing . . .
Anyway: the other night when Elina was here and we were playing SH2, she asked me where my save point would be. I said, “You mean, in time? Where would I reload from if I could?” and she said yes. The answer came immediately of course: “The year 2019.”
Last night, perhaps because of this conversation, I approached the red square on my bedroom wall and gazed into it. I had a dream about the year 2019. I was back in it again. My brain had reloaded from a save point I had made at the beginning of summer of that year, which was one of the best summers of my life. And so happily I wandered around inside it. I played the part of my 31-year-old myself, who had no idea how good he had it. I distinguished my memories of the future, knowing that after that summer, The Final Summer, the party would finally be over for all of us. I decided to simply absorb as much of that time and those people as I could before I awoke again into the dark uncertainty of 2026.
Why was 2019 so good? I have written of it many times on this very website:
Were I to come up with some sort of metric to assess the many years of my (adult life), it would quickly become clear that 2019 was the “best” one. What would be the criteria? I guess that means things like: 1) my house, 2) my car, 3) my job, 4) my friends, 5) my g-g-girlfriend(s), 6) things I did, 7) places I went, 8) people I met, 9) number of books I read, 10) number of movies I watched, and so on.
In which case: In 2019 I had a cool house and a cool car and a cool girlfriend. I had good friends who lived close by and who came over often, and had good friends from far away who stayed with me. I did a lot of new stuff and went on several trips and met a lot of cool people. I read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies. Yes, it was a good year, and probably the most amount of quote-unquote stability I’ve ever experienced. Nothing has ever really come close to it again.
Last night I lived inside my dream with all those people I love from back then for as long as my mind could sustain it. My dream was a blend of my own memories and of photos taken by my good friend Tombo in Spain, who stayed with me for a whole month back then:
But it was not to last. Eventually something inside my sleeping body stirred and the dream world, the dream of the summer of 2019, began to collapse in on itself. I’d burned through all the Trazodone in my system. I felt a sadness as I watched my dream freeze in time and turn black and white and come apart. I had the sudden sensation of being terribly alone inside myself.
I opened my eyes and awoke at noon on my couch in Berlin in the winter of 2026, a few weeks after my 38th birthday. No more house, no more car, no more Pink-Haired Girl, no more Dante . . . I looked outside my balcony and saw that it had snowed overnight. I wondered at it all. My chest ached and I felt a longing. And then I stood up and stretched my skeleton and walked towards the kitchen to make coffee.
