Reflection
It's -6C at sunset outside our home in suburban Canada. I've spent the last few hours playing a video game with my young boys.
It's -60C and partly cloudy on Etchell Minor, a distant planet with a landscape reminiscent of the Mediterranean. I've just spent the last few hours building structures with my boys on an outcrop by a windswept lake.
On a luxurious patio, my avatar is sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with my son's avatar as we watch an impossibly beautiful sunrise enchanting the sky and mirrored in the lake below.
I know this isn't real. This is a trick of sand and electricity, a manifestation in 1920x1080 pixels designed to activate something primal in my brain.
But it feels real. It feels close. It feels profound. In my heart, it carries a similar feeling and intensity as if I were watching the sunrise side by side with my son in some exotic locale on Earth.
It seems silly that a video game experience can be felt so deeply. It's not real, and it has never been real.
But I could say nearly the same thing about some of the most important moments in my life.
I think of the nights my boys were born, and the nights they were made. I remember the faces from endless weddings and graduations and funerals. I can still feel the shape of my father's body during the embrace I didn't know would be our last.
All of those events are over and gone, no longer real. The places and people have disappeared, vanished or reshaped into something else. All that remains are imperfect memories of feelings and sensations degraded over time, now representing something between “once was” and “never was”.
I look back on photos from these events, choked with emotion, and realize how much I've misremembered. The way I recall it today is not wrong, but not right either – true emotions from unreal memories of experiences which never quite existed.
As I look at the screen, I know everything I've built with my sons today is just data on a server. One day that server will shut down, and what was there will vanish. All that's left of the experience will be of the same substance as all of the other most precious moments in my life.
But today, this unreal experience gives me a moment to treasure twice over – once, playing with my sons in our snowbound home, and again, sitting shoulder to shoulder with them on an alien planet, witnessing a sunrise made of dreams.