We Fell Apart

We all stayed out too late / We fell apart and made mistakes / They said we didn’t matter / So we mattered to each other.

I actually love it," he says. "The Impossible looming void?" "The infinity. Or the depths, or whatever. Everyday problems are unimportant out here.

I have an impulse to apologize, but my mother always says that many women apologize when they´ve done nothing wrong, like they´re apologizing simply for existing.

I was eighteen, a cold cup of tea, unwanted. I had an arsenal of weapons. I was the bringer of madness.

I am so tiny in this enormous world. The water could swallow me easily. There's no telling how deep it is. I have left my old life behind and it was already a life adrift. I'm nowhere. I spiral into the infinite space around and below me, unable to grab onto anything, overwhelmed by the vastness of the sea and sky.

You know how some parents, when their kid is cranky, or messing around when it's time to go somewhere - you know how some parents say okay, then, I'm leaving without you! Bye! And they leave the playground, or whereever? They maybe even go a ways down the street until their kid comes crying and running behind them, begging not to be abandoned, promising to be good. My mom was that mom. [...} But there are other parents who would never do that to a kid. They would scold the kid, maybe, or coax the kid, or pick the kid up, or even get mad, but they wouldn't threaten to leave a little person they're responsible for.

I think you can decide to be obligated to someone. You can decide they are worth the commitment and the devotion. And when that’s what you’ve decided, you step up for them. You offer backup. The commitment doesn’t have to last forever, but if you act like it matters enough to last, it has a chance of lasting.

He has a wildness inside him that doesn't know where to go, most of the time.

My advisor wants to know what the goal is. She’s suggested there could be a prisoner the player is trying to rescue—a father, a true love, a brother, a friend. A witch or a stepmother, even. But I don’t think I’m making that kind of game. I think it’s a journey of transformation for the player. You go from lost and adrift to an ending on the top floor of the castle. Once you’re there, you can look out and situate yourself in the world. You go from weak to powerful, finishing the story armed with skills and weapons and knowledge. She says I need to keep working on it, so I will.

But I clock every gesture, every smile, every time his eyes glance my way.

We wind under a canopy of green trees, along roads lined with ancient stone walls. The sunlight is bright but pale, not the hot, oozy sun of California but rays that feel like lemonade in an icy glass.

And though he claimed to hate everything about his family of origin

I have an impulse to apologize

I look like a scared little girl, without parents. And like a warrior, bereft of weapons.