This is the unedited text of my playthrough of One More Song by Ex Stasis Games. One More Song is a solo journaling game that retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern framework, drawing from a custom music playlist to discover the details. You can listen to the playlist for my playthrough, which was created by me in 2010 and reconstructed on Spotify for this game; note that the tracks are in its original intended order, rather than the order they were shuffled into for this playthrough.
Content Warnings For This Playthrough: depression, emotional neglect, suicide
0. Decide who you are.
Elbow – The Bones of You
You worried, when I went away for college and then went abroad for business school, that our love wouldn’t survive the distance. I can see you now, your hands lingering on the rolled-down car window: uncertain, fearful, convinced that your hold on my heart was this ephemeral ethereal gossamer thing that would snag the moment I rounded the last corner out of town, snap the moment I revved onto the freeway.
I didn’t know what you had to fear. I wouldn’t fail you. I’d never failed anything else in my life, not ever, and I wasn’t about to start now.
Yes, my life would be crammed to the gills with term papers, club commitments, late-night parties, a newly-acquired chainsmoking habit, applications, internships. Yes, my schedule was increasingly falling out of sync with your stretches of free time between classes and curfew. None of that was going to impinge on the space in my life I had set aside for you. If it had been you, departing on that three-thousand-mile flight, there’d be no question that our relationship would have suffered for it; you had made me such a disproportionately huge portion of your life that there’d be hardly any room to squeeze anything else in. But I prided myself on being sensible and forward-thinking. I was always going to do the thing that set me up for success.
0. Decide who they are.
Metric – Grow Up and Blow Away
They said you suffered immensely after I was gone. I’m not sure why they expected anything else. You were always so delicate and sensitive – if your family or anyone else had been paying half as close attention to you as I did, they could have predicted you’d need extra emotional support.
It wasn’t like you were the sort to bury your pain deep and put a happy face on things, either. Oh, you’d make a show of being fine, but there was always this melodramatic poise to everything you said and did when you were in the throes of anger or angst or despair, like you were performing for someone, if only they’d watch and appreciate. And the more your audience failed to take note, the more layered and double-edged and exquisitely sarcastic your words and actions would become. You never crossed the line into being blatant, either. You despised what you called cheap histrionics. You wanted to be taken seriously, always; you wanted to elevate being upset into an art form.
I think you elevated being happy into an art form too, but you told me once that you had never been really, truly happy. You said that even in the moments you seemed happiest, there was still a tinge of beautiful tragedy limning everything. You asked me if I knew what memento mori meant. I did, but I let you explain it anyway.
1. They’re Gone
Beirut – Nantes
You started avoiding having your photo taken – you’d either duck out of frame or cover your face with your hands or, if you weren’t quick enough or observant enough to stop whoever had snapped the shot, you’d furiously demand that they delete the photo or cover up your face before they posted it anywhere. As far as I can tell, everyone just accepted this as your new thing. Just another one of your little quirks to embed into the local social landscape.
I can’t believe no one realized what you were trying to say. You were outright telling them that you were starting to visually erase yourself from the record, from their lives.
Even more, I can’t believe you deliberately hid this from me. You didn’t even skip a beat when I asked you to scootch in close so I could get a selfie of us in that cafe, the last time you came out to visit me. You’d told me you had dutifully researched all the decent cafes within walking distance of the financial district and had picked the objectively best one, based on their web menus. I’d told you you’d need to determine for me what their objectively best drink was, too, and I’d drink whatever you ordered.
I was watching you. I was watching you and you seemed so fine. You talked about how you were uncertain what you wanted to do after you graduated, whether you were going to try to apply to grad school or look for a local job, whether you’d ever be financially independent enough to move out of your parents’ house, and I could see that the frightening nebulousness of the future was weighing on you, but that was such a normal reaction, and I did not detect one single trace of what your true intentions were.
You were already preparing to die, weren’t you? You had been planning it out for months.
On the walk back you insisted on giving me one of your earbuds so you could play music for both of us. You played Your Ex-Lover Is Dead three times in a row, and I thought about how you had discovered that song at sleepaway camp the first summer after we met, and how you had proudly shared it with me when you came back, and how you had beamed when I’d told you that your taste in music was always going to be better than mine. I think that, more than anything else, is why you went on to declare it your favorite song ever, and I certainly can’t deny I have a soft spot for it too.
Of course it was going to be the first song on the playlist you left.
2. Brace Yourself
Modest Mouse – Dashboard
Here’s the thing about me, darling: I’ve never failed anything in my life. I’m not starting now. I’m not starting with you.
Throw me an obstacle and I can get over or around or through it. Knock me down nine times and I can get to my feet and come back swinging ten. All the hard-nosed bastards who thought they were grinding us down to the bone in business school have no idea just how much worse it could get, nor just how much more I could bounce back from if I needed to.
I don’t stop, and I don’t give up, and I don’t take no for an answer. You can drag me through hell and I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience that’ll come in handy in the future.
As it happens, you, specifically, are not dragging me anywhere. I’m going into hell by my own choice. And as it happens, I don’t have the handy personal experience that would see me safely into hell and back.
But I know who does.
3. A Guide
School of Seven Bells – Half Asleep
One of my housemates talks to ghosts.
You would really like her, if you could meet her without getting blindingly jealous. I was rooming with one of my old college classmates at the start of the year, and he had a lead on two other people to go in on rent together, and one of those people brought his girlfriend, and five people was a bit of a tight squeeze for the house we’d found, so when the two of them broke up the guy moved out and his girlfriend was the one who stayed. I think we got the better end of the deal, honestly – she’s a lot easier to talk to and doesn’t mind doing dishes and doesn’t play music super loud at 1 AM, and most relevantly right now, she’s a serious necromantic practitioner. Apparently one of her uncles was on the original editing team for the Book of Siobelle. I’ve always kind of thought she was the kind of person you might have been if your parents had actually been supportive of your interests instead of confiscating anything they thought was suspect.
So I went to see her, and thankfully we agreed to skip the whole part where she tries to insist that I shouldn’t go and I insist that I have to. I covered her chore shifts for a few days while she did some research, and yesterday she went to Kinko’s and got a whole packet of ghost advice printed off, and put it in a three-ring binder for me. I’ve been leafing through it while I pack.
Gotta give her credit – she did what I asked, and she did her best. The directions are really useful. But the ghosts in Hell have no idea what I’m like. All the things they’re passing on warnings about – lakes of fire, glades of temptingly beautiful girls and boys, whatever the “inverted peak of despair” is – they’re good generic advisories for normal people, but I don’t see how any of them could possibly seriously deter me. My housemate also gave me a couple of coins that look like old subway tokens, and some ghost rope, which honestly looks like normal rope covered in cornstarch. But she swears that it’ll come in handy at some point.
4a. The Way Down: The Underworld
SJD – I Wrote This Song For You
It makes sense that the way to hell is through a nightmare. But making your way to hell safely, with full and complete control over yourself, requires setting up a very specific kind of nightmare.
This is the point where I had to tell all my housemates what I was doing; there was just no way I could pull this off without their cooperation. There were a few grumbles about how late they had to stay up to perform all the ritual steps with the exact correct timings, but none of them snickered, and none of them said I was crazy, and none of them said no.
In the end, it all turned out to be more tedious than anything else. I wish I could tell you delicious dramatic stories of my descent into hell, but honestly it was a lot of lying in bed trying to keep myself as close as I could to that thin line between waking and sleeping. At various points my housemates were playing drums, or ringing bells or gongs, or lighting incense, and at 6 AM on the dot everything stopped and, just as promised, the sudden silence was like fire that roared in my ears and rose up and filled my brain.
The first thing that I noticed about hell was that there’s this gentle background crackling noise, like the sound of a blank vinyl record being played. I hoped you could hear it, and appreciate it, wherever you were.
The second thing that I noticed was that there was a great toll gate to enter hell, and there was a massive crowd between me and it.
4b. The Way Down: The Guardian at the Gate
The Servant – Body
For a moment I thought wildly that my mission might be much shorter than expected. If there was a backlog to enter, maybe you hadn’t entered yet. Maybe I could just find you in the milling crowd and bring you back with me.
But I started searching, and I realized something puzzling. Everyone in the crowd was someone who was still alive. Still fully alive and kicking and going about their business up on the surface, or in the waking world, or however we were conceptualizing the difference between life and hell. I guess they were all people who were unhappy with their life, and had basically put their lives on autopilot because they had stopped caring about what might happen to them.
I guess it’s more true than we might think, when we call them dead inside. I guess this is where the rest of them go. Just waiting until their bodies come join them, or loosen their hold on the rest of their soul, or whatever it is. Staking out a position in line to get admitted, like lining up days in advance for a concert.
I probably could have spent some time searching for people I knew. I probably could have tried to talk to them, convince them to turn around, go back, not come here any sooner than they had to. But what kind of moral high ground could I stand on, telling them not to do the exact thing I was doing, just because they had slipped down here by accident and I was here on purpose? And how much time would I be wasting in probably-futile argument?
You probably weren’t here like them, right? You can’t have been waiting here in hell’s entrance line for months or years. You were still so alive, so present when I last saw you. You were planning, I know you were planning, but there had to still be enough you left in you to make that list in the first place.
5. The Ferryman
Stars – Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
I dropped one of the coins into the hopper to get through the toll gate. I probably could have jumped the stile; I was already trespassing somewhere I shouldn’t be, and what’s a bit of fare evasion on top of that? But the rules are different in hell, and I didn’t know the system nearly well enough to predict where I could bend them.
On the other side of the gate was a long platform, something like a subway station or a train station, overlooking an endless gray plaza where gray rain was constantly spattering the cobbles. Or maybe it was a vast gray lake with hypnotically regular little gray wavelets, I’m not sure. There was no one else around. So when a bright yellow taxicab pulled up to the platform, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t open the door and get in.
Your fare, please, said the driver.
“I just paid at the gate,” I said. “To get onto the platform in the first place.”
Your fare, please, said the driver again, with more deliberate emphasis. I swung my backpack off my shoulders and onto the seat next to me, found a coin, and dropped it in his hand. He rattled it on his outstretched palm and waited. I gave him another one, and he started up the cab.
I was staring out the window, thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve been in a place where I could just sit and not think, not have to be mentally juggling tasks and planning ahead, and just wait for the next thing to happen to me. More than a year, probably. Even on my overseas flight to business school I was trying to fill out paperwork and get a head start on readings. Getting to turn my brain off like this is a rare luxury, and kind of a frightening one. Because when my head is empty, some left-field thought inevitably comes in to fill it. Like in this case: holy shit, you’re dead.
Why?
What was going on in your life that couldn’t be fixed? What was happening that was so bad that you decided throwing yourself into hell had to be better? Were your college classmates bullying you? Were your parents giving you shit for not having your future all figured out? And whatever it was, why the hell didn’t you tell me?
Why did I have to find out from a fucking postcard with a handwritten link for a playlist and a note to call your sister?
6. The Hazards of Hell
Kleerup ft. Lykke Li – Until We Bleed
The driver didn’t say anything until the cab started slowing down. Want a smoke? he offered gruffly.
“Yeah, thanks.”
You here to stay, or trying to find someone?
“I’m finding someone.”
I’ll bring you by the loading bay entrance, then.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised that hell has a protocol for this kind of thing. I respect that kind of foresight. The cigarette was a clove, which isn’t my favorite but I lit it up anyway.
The driver dropped me off near what looked for all the world like a massive black warehouse, the kind with corrugated metal sides and everything. There was only one way to go, so I hoisted myself up into the open loading dock. The inside of the staging area was empty and dim, but I could feel this insistent rhythm through the floor. I figured one of the doors out had to lead somewhere useful, so I tried one, which brought me out into a hallway, which led to some kind of foggy atrium, and then the wall of sound hit me.
When I could see again, a burly guy in a dark suit was impatiently ushering me towards a queue. It was still dark and hazy, but the music had started up, and then the lasers did too, and it was impossible to miss the fact that we were all lining up to get into a dance club. There was this excited thrumming energy coming from inside, but I realized that no one in line with me seemed like they were looking forward to going in. But the bouncer at the doorway was waving them up one by one, and when I got to the head of the line he looked me in the eye and I followed where his pointing finger led.
It was a lot hotter inside the club proper. The air shimmered crazily with the heat. Who knows, maybe it was shimmering with other things too – who can guess what kind of extravagant special effects a literal dance club in hell might have? When I could get my vision to focus again, I realized that we – the batch of people I had come in with – were balancing on a narrow metal catwalk suspended over what looked like a pool of lava. Thankfully there was a railing on one side of the catwalk. The other side – well, it faced out onto the bulk of the room, where the club music was thumping and the lasers were etching a fabulous light show through the fog, illuminating the clubbers in brief teasing flashes: a beautiful woman with glittering jewels stuck onto (or maybe embedded into) her bare skin, a sinuous form with a hawk mask and a pair of wings with pinfeathers flowing like a handful of ribbons, a slender young man wearing a coat that looked like the night sky. They were all turning to look at us. We were on display.
The music paused. In the heavy anticipatory silence, an overhead spotlight came on, pinpointed on the guy at one end of the catwalk. He was wincing and squinting and I saw that he was probably younger than me, probably just a teenager.
A deep growly voice came on over the PA system. This supplicant from the living world comes here seeking someone. A smattering of laughter from the clubbers, and one enthusiastic high-pitched whistle. What have you to say for yourself, supplicant?
I was watching the guy. He opened his mouth, but he had totally frozen up. Therefore, it wasn’t him, who spoke the next few words. It sounded like a voice that could have been his, that could have been a recording, but it was coming from the PA system, not from his own mouth. I’d brave the depths of hell itself for you, baby. The clubbers laughed and clapped as if they knew exactly what was coming, which I guess they must have.
Do you stand by your words, supplicant? boomed the disembodied voice. Or will you depart and be forsworn?
The guy looked intensely miserable, and his own actual voice was just a defeated rasp. “I stand by ’em.”
The supplicant has spoken. What is your answer?
Out in the crowd of clubbers a second spotlight flared to life. I couldn’t see who it was picking out, but the crowd hushed in expectation, and so I heard the exultant shriek quite clearly. “Depths of hell, you fucker!”
As far as I could tell, the stretch of catwalk underneath the guy’s feet just vanished. He didn’t even get to scream properly as he fell – just a panicked yelp before he hit the lava and submerged with a hiss of steam.
This supplicant from the living world comes here seeking someone. What have you to say for yourself, supplicant?
The spotlight came up over the next person in line, a woman who was probably in her early thirties. She was leaning back and bracing against the rail, but her expression was set and she was staring straight ahead. She even mouthed along to the words that played over the PA in her voice: “I would take a bullet for you any day.” And then, without prompting, in a clear voice, “I stand by my words. Look… I know I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. But I’m here now.”
The supplicant has spoken. The spotlight moved over the crowd. What is your answer?
There was a much longer pause this time. I thought I could hear someone crying. The woman on the catwalk’s expression softened. Then from the crowd I heard a tear-laden voice, “Yeah… yeah. Okay. Give me the gun.” And then the crack of a gunshot, and then the woman on the catwalk crumpled over with a keening sound.
The guy who had been next in line didn’t wait for the spotlight or his cue. “I’m leaving,” he announced loudly. “I don’t care what I said way back when. This is fucked up.”
Be forsworn, then, and go with the knowledge of your treachery.
And he just vanished. It’s anyone’s guess whether he got teleported to some kind of even worse ordeal, or whether he was just kicked out of hell, and living with his failure was the worst possible punishment at that point.
But he had been the guy next to me. This supplicant from the living world comes here seeking someone. And now the spotlight came on directly over my head, and despite myself, I winced a little. What have you to say for yourself, supplicant?
And then there was… silence.
If it had been you up there, I think there would have been a dozen different highflown expressions of sentiment they could have taken their pick of, to torture you with. But if it had been you up there – well, it wouldn’t have been. Because I wouldn’t have been down there in the crowd.
I guess I’d never made the mistake of promising you things I knew I never intended to actually do.
The silence just kept going, so I cleared my throat. “It’s true,” I said. “I’m here to find someone.”
The supplicant has spoken. I craned my neck to see where the spotlight in the crowd might rove. To see where you were. What is your answer?
Instead, all the laser beams swept over the crowd, and as they converged on the far side of the room, they left tracers of light in the air, in an impossibly intricate pattern. And then the spotlight came on over it, and I realized it was a throne of light, and then I realized there was someone already sitting in the throne, someone who was languidly rising from a slumped position, someone who looked out over the sea of people and somehow met my eye from all the way across hell’s dancefloor.
You are granted an audience, said the King of Hell.
7a. The King…
Kyo – Dernière Danse
I don’t remember how I got off that catwalk. I have a vague feeling of floating through the air, over everyone’s heads, but I also have a vague memory of blinking and finding myself on my knees in front of that light-traced throne.
I got up off my knees, first thing.
The King was looking down at me.
I can’t be sure if his hair was black or silver or red; I only know that it was long and unbound, flowing over his shoulders, with a few stray teasing tendrils lying on his bare chest. I can’t be sure if his eyes were red or gold or green; I only know that they were piercing directly into mine, unblinkingly. I can’t be sure whether he was wearing an open coat that shone like the sun or a mantle that shone like the moon or nothing at all above the waist. I only know that he wasn’t wearing a crown. He didn’t need one, to announce who he was.
The King spoke, and his voice was a terribly tender undertone of a whisper against the pounding beat of the dance music that had started up again:
Be welcome, supplicant. And be warned. The one you seek is not here. At least, not as they were, and not as the person you thought they were.
Your love, for whom you undoubtedly have braved much, has entered my court, and partaken of my food, and known my regard, and shared in the wild pleasures of my bed. They are a true creature of hell, now, and it would be a great unkindness to bring them back to a world where all they once enjoyed will pall before their sight, and all they once loved will be a disappointment.
If you cannot accept this, turn back now, and spare your love the knowledge that they are no longer precious to you. If, on the other hand, you still desire their return, then you may speak, and tell me who it is you seek.
“What?!” I exploded. “You don’t even know who it is I came here for, yet you’re absolutely confident you fucked?”
The King smiled, and he looked at me, and I nearly fell back down to my knees under the weight of his regard. His voice went, somehow, impossibly, even more gentle and alluring.
I am the darkest and dearest dream of every soul crying out in despair. I am every desire they dare not name and every fantasy they tremble to contemplate. I am the promised fulfillment of everything the world denies them. Yes, of course I know them all intimately.
I understand them in a way that no one else ever will. And communing with me adds to my glory without diminishing their own. What earthly lover could ever say the same?
7b. …and the Queen
Now, Now – Everyone You Know
I hate to admit it, but my brain just… froze up, then. Or maybe seized up is a better way to describe it. I think my vision went black for a minute – it was just all roaring electricity and this boiling rage building up behind a concrete wall of denial. So I don’t know whether I missed seeing when the Queen stepped forward, or whether she had been there the entire time.
She didn’t radiate that same overwhelming, awesome power that the King did. She was standing and looking at me, just as any ordinary woman might look at me, and I couldn’t tell whether her hair was blond or brown or dyed some other color, but it was only in the way that I couldn’t be sure what anyone else looked like under the strobing lights; she, apparently, was not someone who needed to be everything to everyone. The main reason I knew she must be the Queen was because she lifted her hand and spoke to me, just to me, and the King did not deign to notice.
Not all hope must be lost, if your heart is true. And my husband is not the only power that reigns in hell.
She smiled then, and my mind seemed to clear suddenly.
Come, she said, and walk with me in my gardens. Or if you want to depart, you may go in peace.
I took a step towards her almost automatically, and suddenly the lasers weren’t there anymore, and the thumping beat of the music had stopped, and the fog cleared up and rolled away. The Queen and I were standing across from each other in the middle of some kind of paved courtyard, surrounded by brick walls and stone arches. Under the unbelievably bright yellow glow of the wall-mounted lanterns I could see her more clearly now, and she looked –
Well, you already know, and you probably know better than me. The Queen looked like me – but as she dropped my gaze and started strolling, she passed near one of the other people in the courtyard, a dejected-looking man slumped against a wall, and her appearance shifted smoothly and perfectly to match his. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of other people sitting or lying in this courtyard, I realized, and the Queen’s form changed to mirror theirs with every step she took.
The King deigns to cultivate only those types of despair that he enjoys, said the Queen as I hurried to catch up to her. The unglamorous work he leaves to me.
“So do you know where – ” I started.
No. She turned towards me, and smiled at me with my own face. And do you know now which court you would rather find your beloved in?
I can’t lie: seeing the bleak emptiness on the faces around me, the same expression I saw every morning in the clusters of people huddling around the mouth to the subway, it was impossible not to hope that you were having fun partying instead. Even if you’d never really been the clubbing type.
Hell has but one rule, said the Queen. No one may leave who does not wish to leave. You cannot force anyone to return with you. You can only wait at the gate and ask, and hope, and wait.
“And if someone does want to leave,” I asked, “you just – let them?”
I do not rule my courts jealously, said the Queen. If any within my walls truly wish to stand and set their feet on the path back to the waking world, well. It would bring my heart joy to see my gardens diminish.
8. The One You Lost
Mirah – La Familia
The Queen walked me out to what she called neutral ground. At first it looked like a stretch of barren emptiness, but after she left and I had waited around a little while, I sat down in the chair, and then drummed my fingers on the countertop, and glanced up to check the menu, and piece by piece that impossibly hipster cafe near the financial district settled into place around me.
(I didn’t do a great job remembering all the details. Only two drinks on the menu blackboard actually had prices, and the bakery display just had some vague colored blobs in it. But the pattern of the woodgrain, the shape of the sugar holder, the funny little handle of my coffee mug and the gilt patterning on the edge of my saucer, those were all crisp and clear.)
I heard the door push open. I kept my eyes on the table and waited three breaths.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” you said.
“I got you a drink,” I said.
“What did you want from me?” you said, and then I had to look up.
You looked exactly like you had that day with me, down to the rumpled beanie and the reusable water bottle dangling from a carabiner, and I couldn’t be sure whether you had chosen to look that way for me or whether my mind had summoned up your image the way it had summoned up the rest of the cafe.
“I just wanted to see you,” I said. “To talk to you.” To bring you home, exactly the words the Queen had warned me were unacceptable.
“I meant before.”
I wanted you to be happy. You hated those words, that sentiment. I wanted you to be mine. No, taken as a standalone answer that implied too many things that just weren’t true. I wanted you to brighten the edges of my life and show me things I would’ve been too busy to go seek out by myself.
“I wanted you to be free,” I said.
“I’m free now.”
“Sit down,” I said, “please?”
9. The Bargain
Gotye – Heart’s A Mess
“If that’s really all you wanted from me or for me,” you said, and I could hear how you were deliberately lacing your words with bitterness and hurt, “why are you here?”
“Because I miss you,” I said.
“You didn’t even know I was gone.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I know now.”
You bit your lip and looked away, and I knew you were mentally rewinding a step, looking for a new angle to take, to go on the offensive.
“You don’t have to come back with me,” I said, “but I would really like it if you did.”
You chewed on your lip a bit harder and then – “How much?”
“Sorry?”
“How much would you like it?” you asked impatiently. “What would you promise to do, if I came back?”
I took a deep breath. “What,” I said, “would you like from me?”
You clamped your lips together for a moment. “I’m not going to ask for things just so you can turn around and say no to it all.”
We were both silent for a moment. “Yeah,” I said at last. “I’m not going to pretend I wouldn’t say no to things I know I can’t do. But you’ve never asked me for anything I couldn’t do.”
“I’ve never asked you for anything!” You smacked the table and the cups rattled. “I’ve always been hanging around waiting to see what you’re willing to do for me – what crumbs of attention you deign to toss my way – trying so hard not to annoy you – trying to figure out when to back off because you had something more important to do – and your whole life has been a series of things that are more important than me, hasn’t it?”
Another deep breath. I looked at you until you were forced to meet my gaze. “I’m here now.”
“What, did your schedule miraculously clear up?” you asked with as much sarcasm dripping from your voice as you could manage.
“Coming to find you was more important.”
You tipped your chin up a bit so that your gaze was now the challenging one. “So – what, do I have literally kill myself every time I want your attention?”
It could always be worse. Things could always be so much worse.
“If you did,” I said carefully, “I would come back here again for you. At least once. Not sure if I’d do it more than once more, because after a certain level I have to assume that you do actually want to stay here to get away from me. Is that already the case now?”
“I don’t know,” you said, and you looked away.
I sighed. “I know you’re angry with me. I don’t really understand why. But I want to understand. That’s what I’m promising, I guess. If you come back with me, you can explain to me in excruciating detail every way I failed you and every way you want me to be better.”
Your hands were trembling as they closed around your cup.
“Deal,” you said.
10. Don’t. Look. Back.
Imogen Heap – The Moment I Said It
The Queen had emphasized that the only thing that could stop someone leaving hell was if they didn’t want to leave. I have to say, I didn’t really get the appeal of staying in hell myself. I could hypothetically see how it could appeal to the kinds of people in the King’s and even the Queen’s courts. I just didn’t get why you wanted to stay.
When we packed up and left the cafe and started walking in the direction you said the toll gate was, I realized that the issue wasn’t what appealed to you here, but what might put you off from going back.
I couldn’t ask you if you’d really been part of the King of Hell’s revels. I couldn’t ask you how you were going to explain things to your family. I couldn’t ask you how long you’d been seriously planning all of this. I couldn’t ask you what you were going to do when you got back. I was not-asking those things so loudly that you picked up on it, of course. The silence became frosty and brittle.
“Do you want to live with me, when we get back?” I asked. “Might help with the whole… figuring out how to break the news to your parents part, if you’ve got time to pull your thoughts together first. I know my housemates won’t mind, especially if you’re rooming right there with me. And I’ll be right there, in case – “
“In case what?” you asked suspiciously.
I weighed my words for a moment. “In case you need me.”
“I always need you,” you said in a small voice.
I took a deep breath. “I’ll make you a tray of linzer muffins tomorrow. Whenever ‘tomorrow’ is, when we get back.”
“I haven’t said yes yet.”
“Are you saying no?”
“I haven’t said no yet either.”
I let my breath out again. “Well, let me know what you decide by the time we make it all the way back.”
We took a few more steps and then you said, “I don’t think you need me.”
You said, “I don’t think you really need me in your life at all.”
You said, “I don’t think you love me nearly as much as I love you.”
And, well, that’s when I really failed you. Because I couldn’t instantly turn around and pour my soul into a heartfelt denial. That’s not the kind of person I am. And any kind of forced lackluster effort, anything short of an absolutely genuine pitch-perfect denial, would be worse than nothing at all. So instead I opened my mouth and out tumbled the perfectly utterly worst words I could say.
“Do you have any idea what I’ve gone through to find you? Do you have any fucking clue what you’ve put me through?”
I knew the moment I said it that this was not only the wrong thing to say, but the pinnacle of wrongness. If I’d been deliberately aiming to drive you back towards hell, I couldn’t have picked a better way to do it. There was this horrifying slow-motion moment when my lips and tongue were moving and nothing I was saying sounded like legible speech in my ears, but I knew that I had to bite down, to swallow it back, to not let those monstrous words out.
They were out.
Your expression shut down. Just slammed closed. Became an icy mask, and in a way that frightened me even more, because I’d never seen it on you before.
“Yes,” you said in this strange crisp tone. “I believe I do, in fact. Is it not similar to what you’ve put me through?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You left everyone who knew and loved you in order to pursue something you selfishly wanted for your own life, and didn’t care how it might hurt your loved ones, and put the burden on us – on me – to do all the work of maintaining a connection with you. Twice,” you said. “And obviously I didn’t try to stop you or protest, or do anything other than be completely supportive of you, because it was your own decision about your own life, and your happiness mattered the most.”
“Getting a degree is – is not even vaguely the same thing as committing suicide!”
“Yeah,” you said. “Yeah, the difference between the two is that when I try to make a proactive decision about my own life, everyone tells me I’m selfish and wrong and I’m obviously out of my mind and they know best and they have to figure out how to change my mind.”
I took a deep, deep breath. “Can we just go home and talk about this tomorrow?”
“No,” you said. “I’m staying.”
11. Afterwards
Augustana – Stars and Boulevards
You said I didn’t really need you in my life, and I couldn’t deny it at the time. But it’s not like I really need anyone else in my life, either. (And when you think about it, it’s not very likely that I could find someone else who’d be happy folding themselves down into the space in my life I’ve always kept reserved for you.)
We set some ground rules when I went away to college. I promised to call twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and write you a letter every month. And one of the clubs I joined met on Tuesdays, so we shifted that call to Wednesdays, and then my suitemates picked up the habit of collectively going out to parties on Fridays, so that call kind of got dropped along the wayside, and I didn’t always have the time to go out and get stamps, so sometimes my letters sat on my desk for a few weeks before they got sent out. But I always intended to reach out. I was never deliberately avoiding talking to you.
I asked you to agree to some ground rules when I left you in hell. Leave a message with my housemate, the one who talks to ghosts, whenever you have the time. Keep one end of the ghost rope with you, and I’d keep the other end tied to my bedpost, so that if you ever decided you wanted to leave after all, you’d have a path straight home to me.
Maybe time runs differently in hell. Maybe you intend to reach out when you have something interesting to share with me. Maybe you’re not deliberately avoiding talking to me.
It could be worse. Count your blessings, and mine too. It could always be so much worse.
I haven’t given up on you. It’s important for you to know that. I know someone who can reach you, and I learned how to go to where you are. I’m just holding off on reaching out to you because I don’t know how annoyed you’d be to hear from me.
But my offer’s still open, and always will be.
Come back, and you can tell me how I’ve failed you, in as much detail as you want. I’ll clear my schedule for it. I’ll make you muffins. And we’ll have a long talk, a real heart-to-heart, for the first time since… well, you can tell me since when.