Smashing, Baby

When I hit my roommate with a boomerang, he usually lets out a dispassionate “ow.” I don’t do it too often, but when I do, I enjoy it. Roommate Number Two laughs at Num- ber One’s misfortunes, but it’s okay because we contain our sadomasochism to the com- mon room. When Number Three walks in—arguably the most civilized member of our four-person enterprise—he judges us.

He always judges us. Then, sometimes, he joins.

We’re playing Super Smash Bros. It’s a game, so the boomerang that smacks Number One isn’t real. We play at night, after we’ve been working. Sitting on the black futon that we bought freshman fall, and on the sea-green colossus that we (read: not me) lugged down from the Eliot Cockpit, we relax.

We shed blood for that sea-green couch, on its broken wooden frame and against the doorways too narrow for its glory.

The sea-green couch has come to mean a lot of things to me. Sometimes it’s the semester when I left campus a bit earlier than my roommates, forcing them to carry it alone. This fall, it was moving in for our last year at Harvard, almost breaking it in half to fit it into our corner-infested suite. In every mental image that the couch invokes, my roommates are with it. It is them—the couch’s busted back is Number Two’s sore calf, its deceiving comfortability is Number Three’s hidden, deep sensitivity.

The sea-green couch has now gained a new function: It is the thing that holds me, in the most honest way, when I play Smash in a way that I haven’t in almost 10 years.

Smash has always been around: In elementary and middle school, I played, but in high school I stopped. In hindsight I notice the unsettling correlation between the exit of Smash from my life, and the entrance of the thesis statement into it. Life became a bit realer, a bit less fantastical. I couldn’t cite Wikipedia anymore.

After high school came college. When would I play video games? Didn’t I have to start-up, learn economics, and fix things? The thesis statement that killed Smash became a Thesis, my much-whispered about baby that I nurture in a Dropbox womb.

While my thesis is, in fact, about video games, it’s different. It’s about art and politics and America. It’s not about sitting on a couch with friends and Mario and Pikachu. I love it, but it’s work. Recently, though, I realized that work has the strange potential to consume things. Sleeping became a thing that existed between work and other work; eating was occasionally-yummy work; working at my job turned into a twisted break from work.

To stem the tide of chapters and footnotes, I bought the new Super Smash Bros. I brought it to my beautiful appropriately- sized room on the first floor, and asked my roommates to play. We loved it, of course, and now we play it all the time. Yes, things have changed—we may have a beer or two when we play, and now we have to write theses and find jobs and do things that too rapidly signal the incoming reality that we’re flying into with abandon. But still, we find time to play.

I don’t want to sink myself into a life that doesn’t seek out and enjoy the important things. Money is good, and having nice things is good too. But forgetting about the hunt, the chase that we’ve been on since someone told us that junior year of high school was super important—that’s really good. Seeing that my dear friends can still have fun like they did after practicing mul- tiplication tables? That’s excellent.

And, the truth is, I don’t know when I’ll see them again after these next few months. The couch that I sit on is on a rapid journey to the trash, and my roommates to places they probably haven’t even imagined. So I’ll keep the sight of them on the black futon and me on the sea-green couch, cursing and laughing and huddled around a TV and a table covered with empty cans.

Niv M. Sultan ’15 is a History and Literature Concentrator in Winthrop House. When he’s not writing for FM, he’s sitting in a dark room, smashing off with his blockmates.