Three parts of endings for a Friday + quick consumptions

I’ve still been obsessively working on a Twine game. It’s gotten pretty bad because I keep thinking of other things I’d like to include. Anyway, here are some snippets in progress that I liked. These are all parts of endings you can get throughout the game.

After that, I’ve got some quick consumptions on what I’ve read, watched, or played recently.

Move on

In the winter of freezing things, warmth is a haggled-over. An endless freeze descends wrapping Texas in eternal pristine white and sparkling blue. You try to survive it: buy big blankets and puffy jackets, beanies, insulted gloves, and boots. If you could get to the border you might be fine. 

You take off, leaving Austin and trekking across the endless frost of West Texas. During the day the ice is impossibly bright, the sun reflecting off the white, burning your exposed skin.1

Some day, you think, the cold will end. Some day the sun will return and melt things and you will watch the new water roll down city streets and highways, creating vast rivers in its wake.

No Response

In the summer of growing things, you carry your body like a weeping dogwood. 104 degrees during the day, a record heatwave sweeps the nation. You stay inside for safety, isolating yourself by working, watching movies, and lifting little weights when you get bored. 

You, late in the day, head to Barton Springs and submerge yourself. Under the water, you feel weightless. The old muscle and new fat of your body2 are no longer competing, gracing you with equilibrium instead. Sometimes you open your eyes under the water. You like the look of the evening light streaming through the reeds. It reminds you of some fantasy world; the type of place you read about when you were a kid.

At night, the soft dark cools you. You wander the streets and listen to podcasts. Exhausted and slightly sticky from sweat, you sit down at the public golf course and look up at the blanket of almost-black surrounding you. 

Years ago, when you went to West Texas for the first time and saw the stars, you thought hard about the life you wanted. Underneath the twinkling, surrounded by the stillness, you imagined a future where you were soft. A version of yourself where the rough sides of age were sanded down, replaced instead by the soft curve of your new body.

Ghost Him

In the spring of dying things, you are reminded of metamorphosis: how things grow and change beyond their forms. The caterpillar emerges with wings, soaring high into the sky, no longer trapped by circumstance. Or the person transformed into a bug, waking one morning to see a world gone normal, despite his twisted form.

You cut your hair. Get a new job. Hate that one and find another. 

You fall in love again and again. With men taller than you, shorter than you. Men with muscle and some with fat. You learn to love in new ways. You pack your grief up, shutting it deep inside the compartments of your heart.

Once, you were told that grief does not grow smaller. Closure, whatever that is, is a luxury, it's rarely given to all. Your body expands around your grief. It grows bigger than the initial seed. Soon, you will barely feel its presence. The proportions are out of sync. 

Quick consumptions

Here’s some stuff I’ve watched, read, or played recently3 plus one that consumed me.

• Chappell Roan’s Tiny Desk Concert

• Dune 2 - Which was pretty good!

• Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story, by Julia Wertz - A really good graphic novel about life and recovery that everyone should read!

• Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam by Thien Pham is a pretty short graphic novel that’s also worth a read!

• Persona 3 Reload: I beat it, it took hours but I beat it! A better story IMO than Persona 54, definitely play it if you like long games.

• FF7 Rebirth. I feel a little eh about this tbh. I love the way it looks and I’ve enjoyed playing it, but right now it’s not capturing me the same way the first part did. But, honestly, I haven’t played too far into it yet.

• Gita Jackson’s “The Very Dumb Reason Why I Can’t Play Final Fantasy VII” Gita Jackson is consistently one of my favorite voices on video games and other game-adjacent things.

• One that consumed me: Cookie getting into an entire bag of Omega 3 treats while we were at the grocery store and then proceeding to spend the entire night throwing up every hour!5