losing my grip
when you’ve been gripping, white-knuckled, onto an unstable thing for long enough, there will inevitably be a point that you realise your arms are giving out. when, whether you hold on for another five seconds or five minutes, your fingers will slip from your climbing partner’s tired arms. and when, not if, when it happens, you hope that the drop won’t hurt too much.
one of the last experiences my ex and i shared as a couple was a few rounds of peak. despite its popularity, i had somehow avoided it until she suggested we give it a shot together. this came after a few other flirtations with playing games as a couple: playing abiotic factor with an expert made me question my base survival skills; having her act as my ‘handler’ while i streamed armored core 6 awoke something in me, and beating her up in street fighter 6 let me, conversely, see and hear a new side of her. we didn’t quite have a predetermined ‘date night’ each week, but we tried to make a habit of it. there’s only so much you can do to stay close across an ocean, so what better than a game where you literally hold hands?
peak is simple. you, alongside one to three other people, miraculously survive a plane crash and must make your way up a mountain to call for help. your success is dependent on your bare hands, whatever bullshit items you find along the way, and, importantly, your fellow survivors. games in the friendslop genre usually have teamwork and its failures as their primary source of tension/comedy, but peak is effectively minutes spent hiking up small inclines, chatting with your friends, broken up by near-death experiences that require teamwork to not become actual-death experiences.
it was in this mountaintop sweet spot that we found a space to not just vaguely exist together, but spend time in the same space. we couldn’t physically reach out and touch one another, but we could giggle while we pushed each other over and threw items at one another. it wasn’t uncommon or unpleasant for us to spend hours on the phone with long stretches of comfortable silence, but peak’s requirement of concentration and planning insisted on active conversation and action.
climbing a mountain, you have to truly listen to each other, not just stare into the ether while your girlfriend talks to you about whatever fixation has struck her for the past month.
scaling walls, you have to trust one another, trust that you’ll be safe and secure, not question her relationship with an ex or best friend.
there were shards of trust that remained while we played, cracked as they were becoming. it was something we did together to ensure that we were a couple who did coupley things. we’d giggle and exaggerate our yells and play the parts of doomed climbers when the silence got too loud. but our grip on each other was slipping. hairline cracks started to expand.
we’d still climb together on most days, but it was for romantic load-bearing necessity, not out of impromptu adventure. those coupley things we shared became something we did to convince ourselves we still were a couple. our fingers intertwined as we pulled one another up onto ledges, but they could fall away at any time. silences turned from comfortable to painful. the last, fraying tendon of our connection had torn too much.
it ended quite unremarkably, a 3am phone call that stretched to 5am. she had to figure out her feelings for her ex, didn’t feel comfortable with my closeness with my own, and needed time apart. but, you know. a break does exactly what it says on the tin.
as the lesbians we are, we stayed friends. we even played peak a few more times, freed up to enjoy friendslop as just friends. it was different, but i don’t know if it was worse. she still helps pull me up from the depths at times, as i do with her. no one threw the other off a cliff.
we just lost our grip on each other.