After the Accident

The struggle is never the moment but all the ones that have to come after. Context constricting which kinds of moments can thence arise, what can ever be found again in them, but in the moments before they calcify to context lie vibrancies bleak and beautiful, shivers welling up inside you such profundity beyond the summons of these passing days.

This tension between a moment, its kindling, its freedoms, its capacity to believe in enduring, and memory, immutable definitions pressing you to the edge, simmers the wistful anguish of After the Accident. It flourishes into “gold fire touching the place where the road meets the sky,” it winces from “The sun smoldering ahead, as if you are driving into a fire.” The pain of a relationship breaking the more of each other we once made starkens in flashes of physicality skinbright, literalizations of the tempestuous phrases that haunt the mind away from such raw shape and color: “such unforgivable things said as the rain roared and the wind shrieked”. In the oscillation between car crash and the slow motion up to it, we find in each grip the white knuckle implied, the tumbling expands to exceed the speed of your own heart beating: “and you lean over and kiss him and suddenly the ground is shaking, the earth moves and books tumble from the bookshelf and you both leap from the bed as the earthquake echoes the thunder in your heart.”

Carried away by the intractable stream of choices unretractable, inevitability after it’s happened stirring the moments into fireworks of eidolon: “the light streaming in, and it’s blinding, and the air is filled with noise and you hear a snatch of the song about a landslide, about an avalanche, and then you are in the avalanche and your eyes are filled with stars and light and dark and you are floating and then and then and then”. Thens which follow from each other, so you don’t need to, you will go where they lead, flaring up and flaring up until the fire catches, and every otherwise melts away, smoke of the irretrievable occluding whichever horizon you were heading to: “You run in that direction, seeking, seeking, but lost, unable to leave because you didn’t leave that night and so you can’t do it now, circling the fire.”

Yet, paradoxically, in the eye of the storm, a certain pretty of calmed, “The quiet of an aftermath, of the intake of breath before the song.” After the Accident sparkles its violent rupture, a painterly nod at the ambition of your own devastation, as all the follies collapse emerges a wreckage as grand in scope: “You are standing on a sparkling carpet of broken glass, like diamonds on the black asphalt.” In the anguish of irretrievable, a certain tenderness emerges, more selfless than when bewitched by giving your self up to the motion: “there he is, lying curled” so you “curl around him like you have so many times, like an angel to guard him from hurt although you’ve hurt him so many times and a memory is wrapping around your throat, darkening your eyes and calling to you.” You are being called away, you know you cannot stay, suddenly you remember why you once tried to.

In that severance, however, slithers out a surprising lightness, a sudden anew: “You were somewhere else a moment ago, with him, and he’s not here, but you are, glittering in the last sunlight as a memory whispers in your ear and strokes your cheek.” Though you are called back into the old motions, you are also called forward into a new direction, possibility as it oozes from your wounds: “Panicked people push against you, you lose his hand, you’ve lost him (do you want to find him?) and people are running in every direction, away from the destruction.” It’s not that it feels good, but that, having followed feeling bad as far as you could, you try to let go, refuse it the future once drained of color in its sway: “your head hurts and you want to leave, to avoid the future, the past, to do the opposite of remembering…” In the absence, “you can’t see him / and you’re glad / and you’re sorry.” As the irreversible takes hold, simply “watching the transformation as the ingredients become a new thing”. Will it be better, worse? Tomorrow often is better, worse.

That emotive dynamism compels the game beyond the obvious framework that a literalizing the metaphor concept can sometimes threaten. There is enough heartfelt wisdom to wreathe the anguish genuine. Occasionally the trundling force of the text can hiccup: at the very end of the game, your phone buzzes, so I tried “>read message” as I had in an earlier sequence, which accidentally teleported me back into the old sequence, statelocking me out of progress, so that I had to restart from the beginning to do a single move differently. When the landslide does bring you down, Walker’s scintillating sadness strength carries you through landscapes beautiful for the burial.