collections: a weekly reset

It’s April 26th. I’ve decided to reorient my habits. All it takes is one day to compound to the next, or whatever the useless conventional wisdom says about this. With renewed purpose and a small dash of optimism, I’m back to talking out loud here, starting with some catch-up musings from March.

  • fighting fire with fire: the little fires everywhere in our pandemic year
  • faring well with spiritfarer: get in spirits, we’re playing a cozy management game about dying


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fighting fire with fire

the little fires everywhere in our pandemic year

I keep writing about my grief like that will finally help me accept it. I found myself so burned and untetheredfor so much of the past two months. Found myself feeling like so much unlike myself. I kept rationalizing it as the one year anniversary of time as we knew it, but because I never profoundly dealt with it (in the way you deal with things where you crack, then fracture, then splinter open entirely) it felt like I was doing my very best to suppress the storm at bay.

It was like that for a long time, and I found myself overworked and muted and pouring all my time and energy into something I thought would make me feel better, or at least refocus my eternal restlessness. It turns out if you set time aside for yourself, you can actually focus on things you want to.

I had to let myself burn for a while first.

This entry is an excerpt from an email I wrote (mostly to and for myself):

I watched little fires everywhere earlier in March as a life distraction, and I was really compelled by the imagery of the little fires we light in our own lives: the small, subtle, scattered flare-ups that become a wildfire when we distract ourselves or diminish the severity. How, like the management of real forest fires, sometimes we need to let those smaller fires burn so we don’t set everything ablaze.

I’ve spent the past year grieving and writing to rationalize the source of my grief (like what I’m doing here, you see) and somewhere along the way I got really tired of it. Because explaining to yourself that what you’re really feeling is sad and that it’s okay to feel sad and everybody else is feeling another version of sad doesn’t make you any less sad—and I’ve read so many versions of other people saying the same thing in different ways. So I keep going back to this factoid I once read about how humans weren’t meant to grieve in isolation and we are hard-wired to share the grief of a community together, but our circumstances have made that physically impossible. Instead, we mourn alone.

I keep recommending no i’m not ready because no, i’m not ready. It’s centered around this one line about grief and metastasis: the splitting one oneself from the origin point to everywhere else.

You convince yourself you’re ready to rejoin the world, you’re doing pretty okay, and then, days, weeks, months, even years down the line, something breaks inside you. Grief metastasizes when neglected. I have experienced it in the form of full body-wracking sobs when a song comes on the radio, and in dreams I wake up from with tears streaming down my face — but also in shitty behavior towards boyfriends and friends, in steaming, misdirected anger, in embarrassment and jealousy and shame. Processing loss entails acknowledging so much more than sadness.

and how we might not be okay after; we may never be. because once the fire goes out, there is still ash and smoke—and nothing looks like same as it did before.

faring well with spiritfarer

get in spirits, we’re playing a cozy management game about dying

Spiritfarer is a cozy management game about dying. That’s the buyline scattered across Steam and gaming consoles, a glowing endorsement of this aesthetic game with cutsey mechanics and morose undertones. The kind of adorable melancholia, personified in the starburst of a single-player game.

I spent much of March (starting Saturday, March 13) immersed on this giant ship, navigating the afterworld with a bandwagon of rag-a-tag spirits who needed to pass on with a little help. If I had to psychoanalyze why I started this game at this particular date and time in my life, it would look a little like a one-year anniversary where I needed to feel something again. Feeling, failing, fleeting.

The conceit of this game is that nothing is particularly difficult, but you have to manage everything. It’s much like life in that sense, when smoothed out and satiated in the afterlife. There are certain mechanics of the game that I really love that put the cozy in management. Inherently, this is a game about collecting resources and crafting and farming: raw materials need to be crafted into something else to fulfill a higher purpose in the game. It’s soothing to know that there is no such thing as scarcity in the game, that all the resources are abundant if you put in the time and effort to collect them.

For a game that mostly takes place on a ship on the infinite sea, save for the fantastical islands that are destinations for exploration, the navigation is one of the best parts. The map is a projector and uses a starry navigator, the everlight, to mark the start and end points of a journey. Grade school geometry insisted that a proper line segment is line segment is a part of a line that is bounded by two distinct end points, and every part of this endless journey is the composite of all these little segments.

There are other parts of the game too: the characters to meet and collect onboard; the quests that give purpose to the long days of travel; the fishing and crafting to pass the longer nights; the in-game currency, glims, amassed for the exchange of ingredients, seeds, and materials; and the little minigames that repeat with a comforting repetition. It’s all part of the grind to progress and accumulate more (some meta-analysis for thought: you cannot escape capitalist impulses, even in death). The monotony of management that lets you relish in the coziness and consolation of moving forward in a game, in order to learn how to move on.

The soundtrack of this game is so perfectly instrumented. It made me feel calm, quiet, happy, and then despairing when I needed to. The synesthetic mapping of these fictional locations on a map to melodic chords is divine: if you close your eyes, you feel that transformational sense of place envelop you. You are perched on the ship hull, sailing the high seas; the current of the ocean rushing beneath you, the starry expanse of the sky stretched above.

Warmly inviting you in, eager for you to continue on this journey.

this past week