START AGAIN START AGAIN START AGAIN: A Parable
Being stuck in a time loop deadens the senses until nothing feels real. Dysphoria is pretty much the same.
The ya ta tas of Malo Mart wake me up without a start. Two years of daily use diminish the Twilight Princess song’s intrusive violence, although it remains obnoxious: the perfect alarm sound. I shuffle out of bed and into a dehumanizing teal collared shirt and khaki shorts and jostle my oily hair with damp fingers in an attempt to present as person-shaped. Biking to work is my only solace; if I time my journey perfectly, I can catch the sun rising over the ocean as I crest the drawbridge between the town where I live and the one where I work.
It’s summer 2020, and these borders have enclosed my life since I was forced to finish my sophomore year of college locked inside with my family. It’s summer 2020, and my mask muffles my dispassionate greetings as I wait tables in a restaurant on the boardwalk, the ocean just out of reach. It’s summer 2020, and I carry a stone in my stomach whose weight threatens to pull me under. Every day, I paddle harder to stay afloat. I look over the bridge’s railing and see my visage rippling in the water — short hair, thick beard, sharp jawline, broad shoulders. The only thing that scares me more than drowning is looking at my reflection.
(I aim for my eyes when I leap into the depths, hoping this time I can blind myself.)
▶ START AGAIN? QUIT
In the magical land of Vaugarde, an enchanted mirror takes photographs. It’s hidden in Dormont’s House of Change, which has been conquered by a mysterious vagabond calling himself the King, who wants to freeze Vaugarde in time and preserve its people and culture forever. The ones who set off the camirror are our misfit troupe of heroes tasked with stopping him: Siffrin, the patch-eyed, pointy-hatted scamp; Isabeau, the himbo defender; Mirabelle, the reluctant messiah; Odile, the prickly researcher; and Bonnie, the plucky preteen. In Stars and Time subverts typical RPG expectations by starting at the end of the adventure: the heroes have already traveled around the world and found the Orbs that will unlock the door to the House. All that’s left, naturally, is to ascend the three floors of the House, confront the King, and handily defeat him.
The camirror rests on the second floor in an unexplored nook. Only Isabeau recognizes it, and he prompts everyone to count down from three and strike a pose. They all do so with glee — except for Siffrin. The first snap catches him off guard, eyes wide. For the second, third, and fourth, he smiles too, genuinely happy with the memento etching their journey into permanence before they all separate once again, By the tenth, 15th, 50th snap, the grin he paints onto his face is pained, eyes hollow. While the rest of his party is caught up in the spontaneity, Siffrin has grown to dread it.
Siffrin is stuck in a time loop, and he doesn’t know how to break it. He and Loop, the off-kilter celestial being overseeing his temporal adventure, have tried everything they can think of: crushing Siffrin with a rock, scavenging every inch of the House, rummaging for insight in the Head Housemaiden’s notes, slipping on banana peels. Nothing works, but Siffrin refuses to tell his compatriots about his predicament. He believes that involving them will distract from their true goal of defeating the King; he believes that it’s wrong to worry them; and some small part of him believes that, maybe, they won’t care enough to help him. Maybe he would become a hassle and everyone would leave.
At one point, Loop convinces Siffrin to let his party venture forth without him. Maybe they don’t need his help. Maybe doing nothing can break the loop. Siffrin watches them enter the House from the nearby Wishing Tree. He can’t hear them, but he imagines a hurt in their hearts at his absence. Siffrin and Loop watch as the sun sets and the stars peek out of the black sky. Then a loud crack sounds from the House: his friends have made it to the King; that sound means the King has frozen everyone in time, and he knows the King is raising the sword above his head to bring down and —
(Siffrin cannot think about this anymore. He falls out of the tree.)
▶ START AGAIN? QUIT
Ya ta ta. Teal shirt and khaki pants. Hair jostled, bike pedals underfoot. This time, my eyes are not on the water but the sunrise setting the sky on fire. I lock my bike and enter my culinary prison: ten hours of white walls, white chairs, speckled tables and two portraits of fish backlit by LED strips. The same ’70s pop station is blaring “Dancing in the Moonlight,” and I know that “Hey, Soul Sister” and “Hooked on a Feeling” are hiding in the queue, waiting to play when I least want to hear them.
The other waiters trickle in; I can’t help but notice how much better the khakis fit the waitresses, who can wear skirts instead of shorts and add personality to the uniform with earrings and simple ponytails. Our manager preaches the gospel of FIFO, reminds us that customers must be masked except when at their socially distanced tables, and ends her morning speech with a plea to convince the few customers eating at the restaurant during the pandemic to spend enough money to keep the LED strips lit. The days are painfully slow. As I stock the server station with milk and juice and sparkling water that I have never seen someone buy, I feel my edges blur like I am dissolving into particles.
I imagine a crack as the stone leaves my stomach and smashes onto the shoddily tiled floor, but nothing so dramatic happens. The stone started, I think, as a pebble of doubt that I could pick up and skip across the surface of my thoughts until it settled into the silted depths. But there it accumulated repressed desires and stray memories, purple nail polish and stolen bikini tops, and grew into something solid yet brittle. One precise strike could crack the whole thing open. And I know exactly where I would need to aim.
I know what unifies my infatuation with She-Ra and Steven Universe and The Last of Us Part II and Samantha Irby books and Alison Brie’s Annie in Community. I know that what I want isn’t what I am. The two seemed to overlap pretty well until the past few months. The true incongruity between my inner and outer lives could have been drawn by a child: the image only looks perfect if you ignore everything scribbled outside the lines. Those are the parts of me that don’t fit neatly into my conception of the person I am with my friends, family, and girlfriend. I ignore the mess except for brief, vague conversations with friends hoping they provide answers to the questions I refuse to ask: Yeah, gender is a construct. Oh, men can be attractive sometimes, but only a few. What’s bisexuality actually like, y’know? Asking for a friend. No one takes pity on my desperation and just says, “You are [insert solution to identity crisis here].”
How do I gain permission to change from those who love me? I fear upending their image of me and papering over the only life I know in a scramble to create something I cannot fathom. Do I believe in myself enough to become someone new?
(I shove myself into the fridge between the Half & Half and the OJ, hoping someone might pick me up and label me.)
▶ START AGAIN? QUIT
Siffrin defeated the King, and he still woke up in a field, his party preparing once again to storm the house. Siffrin defeated the King, then talked with the Head Housemaiden, and awoke in the field. Siffrin learned he’s allergic to pineapple: field; Siffrin discovered how to make a bomb: field; Siffrin spoke to God: field. It’s a mad dash to try anything and everything to break the loop, and although he accrues knowledge each time, nothing stops him from waking up in the field. In a last ditch effort, he uncovers the deepest desires of each of his compatriots, fulfills them, and helps unlock their true potential, and the loop still restarts. He wakes up in the grass and screams a guttural, primal roar that breaks the peace in Dormont. Each of his friends has a part to play, lines to say on cue, but this time they are too scared (Mirabelle), worried (Isabeau, Bonnie), or cautious (Odile) to interact with him normally. This loop is ruined.
For a single loop, Siffrin’s aloof facade crumples like drywall, revealing the frustration and anxiety he has worked so diligently to cover up. His friends — they talk in circles about being friends, allies, a party, comrades, people-in-arms, but never agree on the democratically preferred delineation — have been reduced to puppets. Siffrin adds each new facet of their personalities into a rolodex for better manipulation. Maybe the problem isn’t him, but them. Maybe he can only rely on himself. He resolves to face the King alone, believing that doing so must be the way to break the loop. He has to restart one last time. He looks at the knife in his inventory and the nearby banana peel. Choices, choices.
(Siffrin fails to aptly play his part and is punished.)
▶ START AGAIN? QUIT
Ya ta ta.
“Coming out!” I yell, exiting the kitchen with a tray of steaming food balanced on my arm — fried eggs with rye toast and home fries, cheesesteaks, seafood scrambles, hot dogs, ceviche, hamburgers topped with gourmet liquid cheese, french toast, summer salads coated in bright pink vinaigrette. It’s possible that there was a time it all looked like food. I drop it off at the tables, refill waters, ask if I can get anyone anything else.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Pour water with a clenched hand. No self-destruction happening here. I play the perfect waiter.
Between shifts, I force myself into the gym. Afterward, I recharge on a no-sugar, semi-intermittent fasting diet that no 20 year old needs to follow. My camera roll fills with unsexy photos of my upper torso so I can zoom in and judge my waistline, stomach pouch, and pecks. Men are toned, men are fit, men have everything tight and close to the body. I do everything in my power to avoid thought; any downtime is filled with Fun Home songs, bisexual pirate witches (A Darker Shade of Magic series) and late-night yearning for Studio Ghibli food and clothing.
Ya ta ta.
“Coming Out!”
Ya ta ta.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Ya ta ta.
“Coming Out!”
“Coming Out!”
“Coming Out!”
(I stare at the dark ceiling of my bedroom, the fan spinning fast and sharp, and open my mouth. Something crawls out. )
▶ START AGAIN? QUIT
I have read that in various loops, Odile and Isabeau can discover Siffrin’s temporal shenanigans through his actions and dialogue, although it never happened when I played the game. My Siffrin suffered in silence. It wasn’t intentional — I just did’t reach enough loops for Siffrin to freak out enough to make anyone confront him. Honestly, I was growing tired of playing In Stars and Time, although I believe this friction was an intentional choice by solo developer insertdisc5. Loops are not only integral to the narrative of the game, but also the combat. Each battle works within the hyper-simplistic rules of Rock Paper Scissors. The system is intuitive but quickly reduces combat into a chore. Enemy variety and unlockable moves shake things up now and then, but I started avoiding combat whenever possible. At the same time, the narrative became sticky and slow, caught in a molasses mixture of Siffrin’s frustrations and my own burnout. This friction has proven divisive among players, but it melded mine and Siffrin’s minds together: we both wanted this journey to end but were at the whim of some higher power. We could only make things move forward one choice at a time.
Empowered by his frustration, Siffrin challenges the King on his own, intent on beating him mercilessly to break the loop. He’s powerful, with rage coursing through his veins, but defenseless against the King’s time freezing attack. Just as it seems like Siffrin might really die, his last attempt to break the loop an unrecoverable failure, his friends arrive with Loop in tow. The celestial overseer, who has made it a point to avoid the group, even refusing to use their names, has finally told them about Siffrin’s breakdown. Perhaps they worried that Siffrin’s sanity could not handle this specific failure; perhaps they got tired of waiting on the sidelines. They never explain themselves.
The story resolves neatly — The King is slain, Siffrin turns into a giant monster fueled by the anxiety that his friends will leave him once the adventure ends (the same fear, we are told, that caused the time loop in the first place), everyone calms Siffrin down by finally expressing how much they care about one another, and life returns to normal for a now hatless Siffrin who relaxes knowing that the people he loves will always be there for him. It’s a satisfying, emotional ending that I can’t help but feel is a little too neat. While Siffrin spiraled into monstrosity, someone else found a solution to his problem.
That never happened for me.
It’s summer of 2020 and the days creep past until one humid, moonless August evening, I decide that my loop is over. I recite the words that I want to say to my best friend who arrives tomorrow, after my final shift at the restaurant. In my brain, these words are smooth and worn; in my mouth, their whispers are jagged. I find the stone within me and mark its weak spot. I know that breaking it will leave shards in its wake that are too sharp to clean up. But I also know there isn’t another way out.
(I crack the stone open. Inside, I find a second, smaller stone waiting to be broken.)
▶QUIT