Welcome to the Universe

Middle school bodies are like crappy NYC apartments: nothing seems to fit right, the smells never go away, and the general experience makes you wonder how growing up was ever considered a good idea.

Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don't get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)

You’ve been instructed to write a short essay on the topic “Should kids have homework?” for English class. While you are glad your teacher is interested in hearing about topics actually relevant to your life (unlike last week’s discussion climate change), you’re not quite sure where to start.

You reach down in the deep well of ideas swirling inside your brain. Homework good… but also bad?

You look where the sky should be only to see a river. You reach for the current. It's warm.

I’m going to sink. I always knew that, but I thought my boat would hold water. None of you know what it’s like to plant a seed by hand. You fix weights to ships, and you tell them the water's fine.

I’m an arduous process, arboreous labor. My bones are the dirt the ground came from, my trees the gift of broken hands. I want you to find the coastline. But none of you see it, none of you do.

It is empty. The world around you is creaks and bones, the hardwood floor a muted fretboard. No one else is around. The universe is quiet, a silent denouement for an inevitable ending. You see it on the skin, the distance. Your time is drawing to a close.

What’s terrifying about babies is how terrified they scream. Beyond the voice’s breakingpoint and still the shrillhoarse shreaking. Listening to them, you just kind of wonder, is it this bad, this whole, you know? Not just that I’ve learned subtler ways to cope with being cold or hungry or alone in a darkness that I don’t know will ever be broken, but worried that it’s worse, that I’ve lost the intensity of these feelings through ineluctable repetition, the fullest misery of our damnation has been worn away, left with whatever ashes we adapt to adulthood: “You cry at the top of your lungs, the realization that you are alive and singular dawning on you for the very first time. It's okay, though. This thought will only haunt you for the rest of your life.” Belying the child crying for their mother is the reality she could not return, our coherence of any desire to live depends on flickering contingencies which do not take them with us, when they go, we are here to be alone inside ourselves, inflictable.

Tension between universality, the empathetic recognition of the baby’s suffering that accords with our own having traveled that road, and individuation, whatever eternal return condemns you it is you who must undergo everything incurred, deathmarches us through the pervasive we permutate: “the normal processions must be carried out. If this is somehow new information, congratulations: a lifetime of disappointment and pointless information awaits. How is it, being born? Do you feel ecstatic? Elastic? Life is something we must all come to terms with at some point in time.” In a rapidfire game of life, Conway’s or Milton Bradley’s, we are whisked through each progressive phase of the ineluctable, accumulating idiosyncrasies primarily in the flinches from them. From “Childhood is a process of aches, pains, and frequent misunderstanding” to “Now, time is slower and bare walls are more noticeable. Like that chip in the wall you forgot to note on your security deposit” we are swept along a sweatprocess that leathers us unrecognizably stretched over the brainbloat accumulated by decades of reasons and wouldbe answers, none of which trigger a transcendence to wrest us from the ungravitas gravity: “Life is a cascading, measureless list of somehows.”

Whoa, you say, that’s pretty deep dude, and the game makes the same snarky snidestep from its subject, with wacky asides like how many McDonalds does it take to make the best of all possible worlds or skateboard tricks you land in a fireball to obsequious applause or “The clown is an affront to God, a pitiful mortal unaware of what is good and just in the world. Clowns represent full depravity and unchecked hubris.” This flippancy deadpans the drama to dry out the soppy philosophizing, which works to the extent it keeps the tone amicable, but somewhere between the game installing updates midstream and interrupting you with zany lists and buckshots of cheap jokes and nonsequitor noneliners, the veering starts to feel Wink Wink Clever again, only in the other direction, and you’re like, okay, you clearly have something interesting to say, could you please just say it.

Which is a shame, because, when it does just say it, the writing radiates clarion certainty not worth shying from. The delicate balancing act between encapsulating universals like “Cinema is verite. Our needs are our mechanisms. Truth must be discovered in order to be truth. Discover the want and want the discovery. / We are gelatin like the Earth is clay. The fact that a question exists at all is beautiful.” and the heartbreaking simplicities that sufficiently fuel any given soul like “There is gestalt in survival” create generative confliction perfectly capable of carrying the game’s moue molting to a grin. Unexpected little ruby pops like “gentle fortress of claret and peel” or “Heat emanated like a broiler skillet spider” italicize a lived particularity that niches connections within the textbook infodumps and vague gestures at “capital-S Somethings”.

Zaniness undercutting the narrative also proves redundant, because this undercut is precisely the climactic fulcrum that poignancies the narrative’s switching tracks from the connaturalist aggrandizing of the psychological into the anthropological to the emotive underscore of the narrative’s soft pulse: “You stare at the conveyor belt. People need to do what they can to survive. Life has beaten us down so much. I want us to be okay.” Choosing not to resolve the tension between the universal condition and its lived particulars into a nihilistic hauteur but rather a gentle awareness of the fragile interstitially stitched together psyche, the one of one that is “here in spite of all my challenges, my choices, and my mistakes. I am human. I am real. I am necessary. / And yet, even by telling you all of this, even by including that preamble and this vast, quite-encompassing magnitude of a description, I am more than any of these binary truths or lies alone could ever hope to describe or contain: / I am multitudes. / I am complex, the in-between. / I am synthesis.” Compiling all your choices throughout your playthrough into a description of you, the specific player, that creates a surprisingly deep portrait of how you dwelled within overhaunted confines, the liberative immelman out of the inexorable to its inness and ability justifies the central conceit into a call to, if not action, then at least reaction, reagency at last: “Let’s hold on a little bit longer. Let’s change things. Let’s scar.”