Meet me at the bar by Mary Sanche
1100 words, 5 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)
A paisley sofa. A varnished coffee table. A gaming laptop.
It’s summer 2016 and the Mass Effect trilogy has just finished installing. I’m sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor of the living-room/dining-room of the place I’m renting during college. The coffee table—one I got for free from my aunt with the sofa—is the only real place this laptop fits. The desk in my room is buried in homework.
So it’s the living room. Me on the floor. The couch, opposite, empty. The window beyond, flanked by juniper trees. The game, booting up, hums ethereal electronica into my headphones. I create a character—my Commander Shepard has short-cropped hair and purple lipstick. I get the hang of the controls.
And soon enough, I meet Garrus Vakarian.
•••••••••••••
Mass Effect came out in 2007. I was already a fan of BioWare’s Dragon Age games—they were part of the reason I applied to art college in the first place—but I hadn’t gotten around to Mass Effect yet. I watched a family member play certain scenes in its release year, mesmerized by the advanced graphics and dialogue choices, but my first playthrough was this one, nine years later.
Garrus isn’t a romance option in the first game. He’s your friend, a security officer turned rogue who joins your fight against a corrupt secret agent. He’s also a Turian—an angular alien race with insectoid features. Garrus is reliable, a sharpshooter, and firm in his beliefs. He has a film noir sort of ease about him, carried by the performance of voice actor Brandon Keener, and could easily be wearing a trench coat and patent leather shoes—but he’s not. He’s a sentient bug-bird in a blue sci-fi armour.
Immediately, he’s my favourite. That’s the point of these role-playing games. You can pick favourites. You navigate narrative situations, selecting ‘paragon’ or ‘renegade’ dialogue options through the player character Shepard. You disappear into the role, if only for a few hours a day.
You are Shepard, and Garrus is your right-hand man.
•••••••••••••
It’s the summer of 2016, and later that year I will be diagnosed with clinical depression.
I had asked my family doctor for medication well before then, around 2010, when I broke up with my on again, off again high school boyfriend, and I felt I was unbearably sad. Not sad to be out of the relationship, but that sort of deep, dark, insidious sad that made me hate myself and stay up at night crying. I felt like everything was my fault when, in hindsight, the relationship rang enough of emotional abuse that many friends had tried to warn me about it. My perception of reality was distorted.
In 2010 my doctor said, “You are young. Put on some rose-tinted glasses. Things will get better.”
In a sense, they did, but to a teen with a poisoned sense of the truth, all I heard was: “Your feelings are incorrect. You have faked something.”
•••••••••••••
BioWare games always make me weepy. Before I had dipped into Mass Effect, I had cried over the ending of Dragon Age: Origins. I had teared up about the 2015 Trespasser DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Now, I got to do that all over again—just with more space travel.
Unlike the Dragon Age series, which follows individual hero characters through a single game of narrative each, in Mass Effect, you are Commander Shepard for all three games. (The fourth, Andromeda, takes place in a separate galaxy.) That means that you experience three games worth of overarching, connected narrative, each a direct chronological successor to the last.
Garrus Vakarian sticks with Shepard through all three games.
Granted, you can make decisions throughout the game that could jeopardize your relationship, or the Turian’s life—but he’s my favourite. Naturally, I keep him around. I choose all the dialogue options with a little ‘heart’ designation.
All three games. All summer long.
Me, sitting on the floor. A laptop on the coffee table.
An alien boyfriend.
•••••••••••••
The game isn’t there when my college partner agrees that I should get help.
I’ve finished the game. I’m the sort of person that finds it tedious to replay a narrative too soon after finishing it, because it’s too fresh in my mind. There is something special about playing a game series like Mass Effect for the first time that can’t possibly be replicated.
Besides, I don’t have time to play games.
I’m in my senior year of art school and working like mad. I am not in the classes I need to graduate, because they screwed up registration, like they always do. I am emailing the department head. They are angry emails. I am crying. I am pacing. I hate my paintings. I don’t see the point.
I am watching an owl fly silently from lamppost to lamppost. I am in the car, which is in the gravel lot of a city park. The stars are out but I can’t focus on them through my wet eyes. My partner is in the passenger seat. He tells me he’s worried about me.
In 2016, my doctor says, “You know, I’ve learned more. I’ve gone to conferences about mental illness. You may be right. Let’s start you on some medication.”
My partner and I are still together. It will be nine years in October.
•••••••••••••
The Cipralex makes it harder to cry.
The floor of my feelings has been brought up to meet me somewhere more comfortable. It isn’t the bleak vacuum of space dropping away forever, anymore. The ceiling is lower, too, which is harder to face. I don’t feel as excited. I don’t glow with joy when a painting turns out the way I want it to, but I do feel relief instead.
Relief that I’m graduating. Doing the right thing for myself. Relief at quitting my part-time job, even though things are uncertain. Relief, especially, that I’m not tumbling out in zero-G screaming every time I get an email.
Before that, though, I finished playing Mass Effect 2 and 3. I finished it in the rawness of an untreated mental illness. The only thing that can get between Shepard and Garrus, as it turns out, is the end of the world—and even then?
Facing down the final confrontation with galactic evil, Garrus tells Shepard, “[There’s] an old saying here on Earth: ‘May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.’ Not sure if Turian heaven is the same as yours, but if this thing goes sideways and we both end up there… meet me at the bar. I’m buying.”
•••••••••••••
Gaming affords an alternate way to interface with your emotions. Perhaps, instead of being who I am in the real world, I am Commander Shepard. I am a gun-carrying badass with all the right renegade dialogue options. I can stick up for myself. I transcend gender, because I am wearing cool high-tech space suits.
Maybe you are Commander Shepard, too. Maybe this is your third play-through. Maybe you’re also dating the sharpshooting bug-alien.
Maybe we’re both brave enough to face the battle ahead, and we say, “Goodbye, Garrus. And if I’m up there in that bar and you’re not—I’ll be looking down. You’ll never be alone.”
Mass Effect 3. Windows PC version, BioWare, 2012.