Reflections

It was important to me to return my least favorite roommates pants.  Really, things start much earlier. There was a wallet I got as a child. When I try to think back to it, the details begin to blur. It was small and denim with some embroidered detailing in pink or maybe purple. I was young enough I don’t remember my age, maybe 6. I had no need for a wallet. Nothing of value to carry in it. But I thought it was a beautiful thing and a gift and I loved it dearly. I lost it. Somewhere. Somehow. The way children lose so many things. Dropped on a floor or a bench unnoticed. I remember it simply as being there one day and gone the next. for months, I looked everywhere I could think: in the house, my backpack, my pockets, the lost and found. It never did turn up again. I think about that little wallet to this day. I once thought I was going to die in an airplane crash. I sat there in the sky, thinking through my whole life, tallying it up in my mind. The worst part was that I was leavi...

This post contains spoilers for Disco Elysium.  Last year, a lifetime ago, I played through Disco Elysium with my then partner. We built a character with high psyche and followed our emotions and Inland Empire to discover the mysteries of that strange world. Last week, I decided to replay it on my own. I created a high physique and intellect character in the hopes of finding different dialogue. A part of me thought that maybe playing it through, facing Harry’s fears, might help me face my own. The ex-something who haunts him. Who his brain keeps telling him to forget but who he can’t stop picking at all the same. I know the feeling. Disco Elysium is a story about many things. One of those things is love. After all, if you have a high enough Inland Empire when examining the body (as I did in my first playthrough but not my second), the victim will tell you that love did him in. But no one you meet in the game is much in love with anyone or anything. Every character is hurt and jad...