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“I see you,” says the child in the game. In a wonderful twist on the idea of unmasking someone (where the façade looks good, but what’s underneath is not so pretty), the narrator of Ira Marlowe’s “Arielle” http://soundcloud.com/ira-marlowe/arielle sees through the song’s namesake, all right. But he finds beauty under the "professionally bored" pose she takes, out with friends, because he remembers her spirit from an earlier day: “I used to hear you playing at that club on Lincoln Way / You had a way of singing what my heart refused to say.”

Whether she was aware of it or not, something she did back then called to him, and now he’s returning the favor. You could say he’s looking for a moment of truth, just as Peter Bretter is avoiding one at the beginning of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xuMfKxXnDk

Fresh out of the shower, Peter stands frozen as Sarah tells him she’s breaking up with him, and when she asks him could he please put some clothes on he says no, because once he gets dressed it’ll be real.

Perhaps both characters are holding on to the past. The narrator in “Arielle” is talking to the woman he knew way back when in the café; Peter hopes if he stands still he’ll get the old Sarah back.

They’re not alone. In an episode of the television show, Love, American Style ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love,_American_Style , a fellow who always goofs up on dates somehow gets hold of a time machine. Perfect! Now, if he makes a mistake on the date he can just go back in time and redo it. But something goes awry and the machine gets stuck, leaving them trapped in the moment she’s ringing the doorbell and he’s answering it.

We all want to get it right. But the only way we ever do is to pay attention to what is happening here and now, not the way things used to be (or the way we thought they were: Arielle always did have a life outside the café walls; Sarah dropped several clues before the breakup), or the way we wish they were, but what is actually going on at this moment.

In the days when we all had answering machines, we’d call a friend and say, “Hi. It’s me,” hoping someone was home. The narrator of “Arielle” might well be saying, “Hey, Arielle, it’s me. It’s me. I know you’re in there, somewhere. Come out and play.”

©2011 2013 Laynie Tzena.