The Love of My High School Life

The opening piano notes of 10,000 Maniacs’ “Because the Night” will forever be entwined with Mortal Kombat in my mind. In 1993, I was a junior in high school and madly in love with my new boyfriend.

We were typical students with limited money, so we spent our Friday and Saturday nights at the mall. I played dress-up in the department stores and tried on prom dresses. He caught up on his athletic magazines in the bookstores. Invariably, we ended back in the food court for dinner and a quick stop at the arcade.

For broke high school students, the arcade was an acceptable alternative to the movies. We easily spent a few dollars playing our own games, but the highlight of the arcade was the Mortal Kombat game. The crowd surrounding the game was always large, and often I couldn’t see over the heads of the players. We stood sometimes for hours watching the not-so-epic battles and praying that the player knew how to perform a fatality.

10,000 Maniacs’ MTV Unplugged album had been released that summer, and Because the Night echoed through the mall and our car stereo. I still remember very clearly standing in the arcade and hearing the line “Because the night belongs to us.”

The words resonated with me and my teenage ideas of love. The overwhelming desire to be near someone. The idea that being away from each other was as painful as not breathing. Our time there in the mall or in the car was our time. The activities didn’t matter to me. What mattered was that we were together, sharing the moments with an intensity that can never be again matched as an adult.

The relationship has been long gone. I still love that song, and I cannot detach it from a sweaty, dimly lit arcade.