hole in the ground

Nobody - absolutely nobody else - can make me suffer as I've made myself suffer. I am my own Hell.

Edit: fuck it, vent time

TRIGGER WARNING: if you don't want to read about deaths in the family, stop reading when I start talking about guilt (I've marked it then and there as well).

Spoiler Warning: Signalis (it'll all make sense).

So... you know those moments of synchronicity, when the Universe just throws pure Understanding your way and your place in the world starts making a little bit of sense? Well, I just got slapped back to reality, starting two days ago.

I started playing Signalis.

I had an emotional breakdown maybe half an hour in. I was sobbing and I couldn't understand why, but I felt that my entire being was in resonance with everything I was experiencing. I was in it. And it got louder and louder as the game progressed.

I don't know at what point this happened, I realised that I wasn't playing Signalis, but I was living it. I was becoming Elster. Every single element of that game was landing blow after blow straight at my core. I couldn't stop crying, I couldn't stop playing, I couldn't even understand why, but I knew I just had to see it through to the end. I reached the halfway point by the end of that day.

The next day, I woke up and talked to the Universe for the first time in decades. I didn't pray, I just talked to It. I asked It to explain - why am I here, why am I suffering, why It still wants me around even though my consciousness had given up, what am I supposed to do.

Then I continued playing Signalis.

I started crying again. I could feel it pulling me into itself again from the first minute I had the controller in my hand. I felt every hit I was taking, I drowned in the characters' suffering, I got swept up by the soundscapes, entranced by the imagery and the meanings hidden just beneath the surface. My brain still couldn't understand why, but I could feel that my soul was no longer present in reality, that it was walking with Elster on her path through. There was nothing left around me but an empty void and Signalis.

Then I finished Signalis.

I got the Memory ending. I was devastated. I spent the following couple of hours standing in my kitchen, shaking and sobbing. Understanding felt like the farthest thing from me at the time, but I just knew I had to go back. I had to dive into it again, to try to reach the other endings, I just had to know why this game seemed to understand me better than I did myself, why everything in it felt so real, so immediate to me, why I was crying again thinking of nothing but the game.

I knew I couldn't wait to reach the conclusion, so being the famished information sponge that I am, I started looking up analyses for it. I landed on Worm Girl's 6-and-a-half hour video on the subject. I dove right into it.

Yet again, it wasn't me watching the video, I was down there with Elster, while someone was holding my hand and walking me through each and every element, explaining my own soul to me. I fell asleep halfway through and slept a dreamless 9-hour sleep. I woke up today, drank coffee, and got back to it.

Then I understood Signalis.

It's a Penrose Cycle! It's all a fucking Penrose Cycle (technically, it's called Conformal cyclic cosmology, but I'll keep calling it a Penrose Cycle, because that man deserves to have his name plastered all over it)! It all made sense, everything! And not just the game, but my life itself! This is what I felt I understood about the Universe for about a decade now, without even knowing it was an actual thing! I'd called it an endless oscillation of matter, fractalised existence, even a form of Reincarnation, but it's a fucking Penrose Cycle!

And then Worm Girl said something which blew my gates wide open: I'm stuck in a Cycle of Guilt.

Trauma from here

Five years ago, my mother's cancer had advanced to the point where portions of her esophagus, trachea, and artery had been converted into porous, cancerous tissue. First, her esophagus and trachea started communicating with each other, then her artery joined in. She was rushed to the hospital.

I got a call at 4AM telling me I needed to be there. It was a waking nightmare. The orange linoleum was sticky like rotten flesh, the smell of chlorine and formaldehide permeated every pore on my body, the sickly yellow light was making my stomach churn, as the attending physician told me we had three options:

• prolong her suffering by a couple of months through the introduction of a stent down her trachea

• prolong her suffering by a couple of weeks by keeping her in a hospital bed under constant supervision

• perform invasive surgery to try to insert a stent into her busted artery, which had the lowest rate of survivability of the three

He looked me in the eye, told me I had to choose, then left.

I walked into the ICU. Mum was fully awake and conscious, staring at the ceiling. I'd never seen her so utterly devoid of vitality. The person who tried her best to "embarrass" me my entire life by breaking out into random song in the middle of the street, who loved telling lewd jokes in the most inappropriate contexts then laughing her ass off at everyone's reaction, the person who got dealt one of the shittiest hands I'd ever seen and always tried to laugh it off, was laying there, pale as a ghost, with her skin drawn tight over her bones.

We locked eyes. I started sobbing. She reached out her hand and I grabbed it as though my life depended on it. And seeing her, I just knew I had to tell her the truth. So I did. I explained to her everything which had been explained to me. I was a decade older by the time I was done. She asked me what I'd choose. I told her I had no right to choose for her, but that all I ever wanted was for her not to suffer. She agreed, but it felt more like an exhale than anything else.

A couple of days later I was running up the stairs to the room in which they were prepping her for the arterial insertion surgery. I barely made it in time to tell her that I loved her. She asked me to forgive her. I kissed her on the forehead like it was the only real thing in the world, told her that I had nothing to forgive and everything for which to be forgiven.

Four days later I was breaking down over her open grave.

I killed my mother. The one person I loved the most during my entire existence on this rock, the one person who loved me right back in the same exact way. I couldn't save her and I killed her.

I never revisited that memory. In the five years since then, I kept it locked up so deep inside me, that I wouldn't even go near it. I could still smell chlorine and formaldehide every now and again, but I just closed my eyes and tried to walk past it. "Yeah, yeah, guilt, blabla, how much do I owe you for this session, thanks, see you next time." I even tried to cover the stench with the guilt I felt for being a shitty son to her as a result of my traumas, and for a while I thought that would be that.

But it wasn't. And that's what Signalis had dragged out of me from the first moment it let me in. That was why I was sobbing, why I became Elster, why every step in that game felt as though I was chipping away at myself.

And I still don't know how I could ever forgive myself for it. I can hear my sense of reason, my empathy, my therapists, every single psychologist who has ever broached survivor's guilt telling me that I did her a kindness, that I offered her blissful mercy, that I spared her so much needless suffering. She died while unconscious, while anaesthetised. She basically died in her sleep, just months before the world went to shit with the Pandemic. Yet my soul simply can't... it just can't.

But at least now I Understand. I'll be back here, dancing the same dance, faced with the same choices, over and over and over and over again. But so will mum. She'll have a shitty life again. She'll try to be a ray of sunshine again. She'll get cancer and will lay in that ICU again, with that horrid orange linoleum, the stench of chlorine and formaldehide, and that dying yellow light. And knowing that she'll suffer over and over and over again, I don't know if I could ever bring myself to make a different choice.

Now I am my mother's son.