The wind stopped first.
A second ago, the world was still filled with sounds — the low roar of the pine waves, the crisp sound of ice cracking in the distance, and the heavy gasp when I stepped on the deep snow. Then, everything was suddenly taken away. The silence was like a thick velvet cloth, suddenly covered. I stood at the door of the small house in _The Long Dark_ that I barely called “home”, holding the last few branches I had just picked up in my hand. I know what it means. The snowstorm is coming.
I went back to the room and closed the door. The world is isolated into two sounds: the crackling sound of firewood in the fire, and my own breathing. Outside the window, the gray sky sank rapidly to the bottom, and the snowflakes began to hit the glass horizontally. I have nothing to do. All the tools have been repaired, all the meat has been baked, and the kettle is humming monotonous songs on the stove. The task list is empty. The game no longer requires me to act, it only requires me to... wait.
This is a strange anxiety. There are no enemies to see, and there are no puzzles to solve. The only opponent is the slowly falling red line on the thermometer and the time itself. I found myself doing something meaningless: rearranging the cans on the shelf according to taste, drawing the vague shadows of the trees outside the window with a charcoal pen on the diary, and counting the number of seconds between one explosion and the next one. My character will occasionally stand up, walk to the window, look at the raging white, and then sit back by the bed. There is no instruction for this action. It happened in the game itself, as if even the virtual he felt the weight of this stagnation.
Waiting has emptied all the grand meanings, leaving only the most primitive senses. The eyes got used to the darkness, so they could see the subtle changes of the fire dancing on the texture of the wooden wall. The ears have become sharp, and can distinguish the difference between the “creaking” sound of the snow pressing on the eaves and the “wailing” of the wind brushing through the cracks. The body also seems to synchronize the rhythm of low metabolism, and the heartbeat slows down. This is not boredom. It is a subtle awareness of its own existence that gradually emerges after being forcibly emptied.
I once dived into the deep sea of _In Other Waters_. Driving a diving suit, floating in the boundless indigo. There is no enemy, no treasure. Only the smooth ticking sound of the scanner and the slow rolling data flow on the mask. I’m waiting, waiting for a signal of life, waiting for a warm current that may be just a heat source of geological activity. In the vast silence, waiting is no longer blank. It becomes a container, full of imagination of the unknown and a trace of almost pious expectation. Every “tick” sound of the closing of the scanning circle is like a heartbeat, which proves that I am still looking for it and paying attention to it.
I also waited behind the sniper scope. That’s another kind of tense stillness. The wind deviation, the heartbeat, the pace of the target, everything needs to be calculated, and then compressed into a long gaze before pulling the trigger, even breathing is paused. The world shrinks into a cross-star, and the tiny figure in the star. That kind of waiting is a full bowstring, and there is thunder under the silence.
But waiting in the snowstorm is different. It doesn’t have a clear goal. You don’t know when it will end, and you don’t even know if it will be really sunny after it’s over. You just have to believe that the fire will last, the wood will be enough, and time will eventually take everything away. You face an invisible giant, and the weapon is your patience.
When the sound of the wind finally began to turn from roaring to sobbing, and finally only the rustling sound of snow falling was left, I pushed open the door. The world is as if it has been rinsed, clean, brand new, and silent to shine. I took a deep breath of cold air, and my lungs tingled slightly.
The calmness at that moment did not come from conquest, but from enduring. It comes from you spending a period of time alone and spending it peacefully.
Our life is full of such snowstorms. In the corridor of the hospital, in the late-night waiting hall, in the blank silence after pressing the send button. We browsed our mobile phones anxiously, trying to fill in every second of the blank, as if waiting is a disease that needs to be cured.
Perhaps, the game is teaching us to regain the ability to forget. It throws us into a situation where we have nothing to do but to wait, so that we can really hear our heartbeat and feel the texture of time for the first time in the lengthened and seemingly nothing silence. It said, look, you can also stop. Just stop. It exists in this wind and snow, not in a hurry to cross it.
Eventually, the snowstorm will pass. And the self who has learned to sit in silence may walk into the next sunny day with the temperature of the fire.
