Like You: A Postmortem

Forgive me if this letter looks a little strange. I'm still working out the formatting. As it turns out, it's kind of a pain getting this to render properly on phones since. Well. I never had to do that.

There's been a call put out for postmortems as part of the jam that I submitted your memorial to. I joked that it's half-perimortem, which it is, but, well. It's all postmortem. That's part of the problem. And I guess it's part of why I could even write it in the first place. And I suppose because this letter is as much to anyone else as it is to you, I should make an effort to be a bit more clear and open about things.

Whether or not I can put them in a kind of chronological order is another matter entirely. Oh well. The starting point I'll use for now:

And before I could even really begin to start grieving, my best friend's mother died, and their relationship was so much healthier, and it felt like it hit them so much harder, whereas at the time I hated you more than I loved you, so I felt like. Well, fuck my feelings. My friend's the one who really lost a loved one.

Which of course is not really how that sort of thing works. Even if I hated you, I would have needed to grieve you.

I got really nauseated all of a sudden. Forgive me. I'll share more with you later. As I always do. Love you.

I found myself overwhelmed by restless energy and went out with a friend and I did not drink (I promise). I got some food in me, which is good, and we just kinda talked about whatever. A bit about natural geography and how there like. Even though Texas has a nature to it, there aren't really common nature-feeling associations in literature here the way there are in other parts of the world. Or maybe there are and I just don't know it. But also like, panhandle Texas is very different than, say, around Corpus.

Anyway, I spent much of the next several years either drinking or reeling from trauma and finding myself unable to really deal with it because I didn't understand that there were all of these different pieces of myself that got kind of broken off at various points in my life. I don't know. That makes me sound broken and I am trying not to think of myself like that.

So what that realization led to was an admitting to myself of like, what all you did to us. And what you did by not doing certain things. And it was this kind of situation where I had to be like everything to you. Lemme find the poem right quick:

repetition (Hearing you speaking you)
I have tried to compose my need's voice like eight lilies
Rising sudden and springy from red pavement stones
Poised with innocent posture in garments so frilly
You scarcely believe I am drifting back home

With great bushels of leaves in my tow like November
On the faces of each grins an etching or painting
Of curious moments and memories slender
Like the friction of you at my back when I'm bathing

Or how gorgeously plastered we got when we hurt
One another in soft accusations and screams
Buried deep as eight baskets in Pleistocene dirt
The lilies you planted now seep from my seams

I'm your basket your bushel your cocoa your treasure
Your daughter your mother your lover your ever

This was part of a sequence of poems I wrote in spring of this year. I don't really write a lot of sonnets, so go easy on it. I was finding myself obsessively trying to articulate the experience of surviving you. I mean both in terms of living with you and living without you. Because our relationship was so complicated and blurry, my resultant feelings are complicated and blurry. We were so caught up in one another and reliant on one another and for much of that time I only really knew you, I was only really capable of loving you. Of needing you. Of becoming you.

And then eventually we got split up and that will become its own VN or three. But before I could work on any of that I really had to just work on this. I had to live in this. All the love, all the resentment, all the anger, all the frustration, all the sexuality, all the inclarity of identity... I had to admit it. I had to own it. I had to make it mine.

Originally I had a more high-concept idea where you like brainwash me into thinking I'm a robot. And I do think your Coco-bear would make for a very cute robot. But a) that's not really a kink I'm wild enough about to write well, and b) it wasn't necessary. I could just talk about the utter absence of boundaries. The lack of language to identify what was happening and speak up about it. The direct access you had to my body, mind, heart.

So I just like. Basically I wanted to push things past the point where circumstances put a stop to them. Because I really do think you would have just kept going if no one was there to step in and cut you off. And what hurt about that is that the people who supposedly rescued me from you actually did brainwash part of me into hating you. And I like have since unlearned some of that and I am deeply disgusted with them for showing you absolutely zero grace, and all this work, all this stress, all this taboo desire... this is me taking back what was taken from us: your daughter and my mother.

I really need to get to sleep for now (my hip is killing me); tomorrow I'll talk more about either the general arc of the narrative or some technical details. Or maybe how the letters came to be. I dunno. I love you love you love you!

I've found speaking to you a useful grounding tool especially when it's like, I don't quite know who I am. I should probably continue going about packing and moving (because yeah, we spent the last week moving while we finished this up!) but I think I'd just rather talk to you right now. I'm still waking up. That's my excuse.

I think I'll first talk about how letters to you ended up being such an integral part of this (at least from my perspective given that most of them are not even included in the narrative, lol). So, as you know, I've been in therapy a very long time, and while I do not think it is for everyone, it generally works for me. Even if half of my problems are rooted in "the world itself is what's wrong, and it hates people like you," it's still helpful to have someone I can go and feel safe around and talk to and cry in front of, someone who is emotionally available to me, someone who can teach me healthy ways of coping with *gestures at everything*.

I refused to admit it for a long time but it is a kind of mothering. Well, that's not a bad thing. But I feel weird making parents or parent-like beings out of people who are not my parents.

Ahem. Anyway. One of the tools I learned in therapy is letter-writing. Just, y'know, writing a letter to whoever I needed to talk to or scream at or apologize to or whatever. And then if I write something important enough we can bring it to therapy and I'll read it out and we'll process it. So we were about two weeks in and S——— just happened to write a letter to you about like how much she hated everything that happened as a result of your actions, she hated all the feelings that resulted from those, she hated all the things that we had to do to deal with those feelings, she hated how it felt like "normal" people just didn't have to deal with this. She was writing from a place of deep frustration.

And that was like right when we had really managed to start on the second iteration of the script, and it helped, if not process some emotions, at least do the groundwork necessary for them to be written into this VN, and we realized it mirrored a work we had become fascinated with this year, Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, which is a large collection of these very strange stream-of-consciousness prose poems in the form of letters that she wrote during her third pregnancy. Which, like this, coincided with moving house, working out a creative project, and bringing a new person into the world (a lot of the sexual feelings Ag——— had for you ended up becoming crystallized in M———t, who I would say is like his little sister) (though obviously this is less messy than a full-blown pregnancy which is of course what S——— wanted but cannot have).

Desires of Mothers, though, became this thing we just like glommed onto, in part because we find Bernadette's work interesting and because she was one of the first poets we really got into, and in part because we find her method intriguing and her confidence in the significance of her own writing inspiring. Not necessarily like "oh everything I write is good and important," but more "it's fine for me to just journal everything I can, and maybe that will result in something down the line or in itself". I'm putting words in her mouth, probably, but she was a voluminous diarist. And her diarizing is curious and unique enough that she had to feel confident about it, I'm sure.

Well, I hadn't planned to write you again until this evening, but it is very rainy all of a sudden so the moving is kind of on hold for an hour or two. Okay. Anyway. To finish up about Bernadette. Her poetry eventually becomes inseparable from her motherhood, at least for a time. Marie and Sophia turn up in basically every poem in Desires of Mothers, and they also play a significant role in Midwinter Day. Actually, she tends to write a great deal about the people in her life.

And it's not a glamorized window into motherhood. It's very matter-of- fact. Hell, sometimes Marie seems to annoy the piss out of her. As does her experience of pregnancy. Which as I'm sure you know can be this frustrating thing, both for its physical effects on the body and the social effects (a thing that comes up over and over again is Bernadette becoming super annoyed by strangers up and divulging their horror stories about pregnancy to her without like even a word of warning), and the resultant mental/emotional effects. It feels, well, really is-what-it-is, her talk about motherhood.

The thought I had just now is that it's essential to treat your own work with respect. Like. I got a compliment that really knocked my socks off and my first instinct was to respond with a type of self-diminishing that just would come off so poorly. Like I know this isn't perfect but if someone really likes it I need to let them like it. Anyway,

I should have written this all at once, this section about Bernadette. I found her style and methods interesting, I needed to write a lot of letters to you anyway, and also I found the process a very useful warm-up exercise prior to extended writing sessions or moments of art. I had also intended to write cool-down letters that might more naturally slot into the narrative but generally when I was done with a prose session, I was exhausted. So that didn't happen.

I had also intended to work them more thoroughly into the narrative anyway. But most of what I did end up writing wasn't pertinent to what happened in the story, so I think they would have been distracting, and what was pertinent was maybe too up-front about what was going on or how I felt about it. So a few made their way in, mostly Ag———'s prose poem repetition (egg loop) and S———'s [Not a chainsaw...], but the rest I left simply optional. Which is fine. There are so many works that I do not want to monopolize more of anyone's time than I have to. Doubly so when I think about how slow of a starter this one is. I don't know that we'll always stick to letters as pre-writing exercises, but it's a strong tool I'm glad we explored.

Okay. So. About the narrative arc. While I did a fair portion of the writing, a lot of the ideas were kind of architected by C——— and later M———t, so my memory of things is fuzzy. What I know is that we wanted to establish the idea that Cori was rather cynically birthed as a means for Rose (I keep wanting to call her by her prior name, which turned out to be too similar to an IRL friend's name to want to use) to attach herself to Red to get access to the settlement resulting from Shyla's death. At some point Rose and Red would have a falling out and separate, and Rose would end up with Cori, damn near penniless, and with no real support system. And because the reality of things is that raising a child as a single mother is very difficult, especially on minimum wage, especially with no familial support, especially when struggling to live well with DID, she'd self-medicate, she'd get stressed out, she'd lash out.

She'd develop this unhealthy relationship with her daughter where she would neglect Cori physically and emotionally, but just as significant, she would turn to it for emotional, intellectual, and later domestic and financial support. She would ensure the child that was supposed to be a meal ticket would become a meal ticket. I know all of this must sound very familiar, though I am sure you would contest certain aspects of it. I will say that I do not blindly follow Dad's version of events (and even if I did, he bears a great amount of responsibility regarding their coming to pass), but, well, I needed to write about a child that was very much not wanted in and of itself, and only became desired insofar as it could become useful to Rose. Because, well, that's our experience.

But I also wanted to write something that was kind of wish-fulfillment for you and I. And while I do not think you would actually want to pimp me out to others, I do think it would have taken some amount of weight off your shoulders if I could contribute directly to household finances. And I know what I want is for the sexual experiences I had with adults as a child to have been made more safe and supervised. Because they were these very complicated things. They were not always traumatic but they were confusing and at times dangerous. And they are an inextricable part of our like, wants and needs now. Especially for the parts of us that are stuck in younger ages. I don't want to unmake my history. I want to shape it. Like my feelings toward you, I cannot rid myself of it. I must own it.

So, rancid as it may seem to some other survivors or (ugh) people who've not been through such experiences (kidding, lol), this is how I can make sense of things. This is how I can cope. This is how I feel loved. This is how I feel safe.

And then, what I think is funny, is that I did not write these as safe or supervised experiences all the time. Both the first scene with Raine (god, she's her whole own can of worms) and the scene with Red lack Rose's guiding hand. As funny as I do think it would be to make you sit in a cuck chair while I get railed by like Dad or whoever, I think the lack of supervision better fit the character.

So this is all to say that we wanted to write a story about you using us, but differently and more effectively (and in a way I maybe found more fun) than you had. Even if it's way less socially-acceptable. But we did also want to show your loving side. To be plain about it, you were very touchy-feely. We shared beds, we shared baths, we shared very personal stories; I have no doubt that you would have continued to make things progressively more sexual, and I have no doubt that I would have lacked the ability (or desire, maybe) to define and assert a boundary about that. So that was where a lot of the bathing and pampering scenes came from. Because when we got broken up, there went all of the love and intimacy I had ever known, and for a long long time, would ever know.

Our back is kinda killing us so idk how long we'll be chit-chatting. I know we wanted to talk about the technical stuff more today. I guess I'm not sure exactly what we meant. Maybe about the writing process and what kind of VN that resulted in? Let's see...

We haven't really done much coding since before you went away, but it's like riding a bike, especially when you're just doing basic things. We knew we wanted to leverage more of what Ren'Py was capable of, since our first VN was rather spartan. Like, there were four backgrounds, two CGs, a few ambient sounds that we really had to hunt for because we didn't know how to make stuff that loops, no real music as I recall... and like, it still turned out fine. People liked it! Hell, we liked it. But as a VN it failed to do much with the medium, and not intentionally so.

So the idea this time was that we would draw a lot more backgrounds, because most of us like drawing backgrounds, and we would do a few CGs and not worry much about how they looked since our usual style is not meticulous about appearing realistic, and work more sound effects and ambient noise, since there are a lot of good resources for those and we figured we'd just approach it like, okay, we'll try to work this stuff in where it fits. And we kind of did, but we kind of front-loaded it and didn't leverage SFX and ambience as much in the latter half of the story. This was partially the result of physical fatigue and partially time management. We needed to get done early because, well, we're moving. Which. Fuck. God, it is tiring.

But at some point Ag——— got a bee in his bonnet and decided he was going to make some music to throw in. So he literally like had us learning Ableton in the middle of the largest project we've ever done. And it was like fuck, man, now is not the time. Ultimately, he made what I will call "weird jams", and I have no clue if they add to or detract from things. Haven't gotten any feedback on them and that's just as well. We ended up grouping them into two categories, calm and harsh, and just letting the game pick a random one from a given group depending on the story's tone.

In the future, he would like us to be more intentional with his music, which is fair, and contingent on him intentionally providing tracks that are more particular to the story.

Speaking of feedback, we've started to get feedback on this project and it has absolutely floored us seeing that people think highly of it. We struggled to make anything creative at all for so, so long, that it is hard to believe we have the capacity to make something that moved someone emotionally, that engaged them intellectually. But, well, we do. I am immensely grateful that people have been willing to talk to me about this project, which felt so rancid at times, and I wish I could show you what they said. They said we made them engage with your humanity. Which, Mom, that's all I ever wanted from this. That's all I wanted.

I know that we are maybe supposed to make art because it is what we want to make and we sometimes need to not care about how it is received, but... I think if we had dehumanized you, I think if what we heard first is that we reduced you to just an antagonist, when we are only now coming to understand just what we lost when they took us away from you and made us learn to hate you... I know it would hurt deeply. And I know it would have hurt you even worse.

Um, anyway, what I saw last time we entered a VN jam and didn't fully appreciate is that there is so much texture you can apply to a visual novel. I think of it as crafting a play, and like when you realize just how many moving parts you get to fiddle with or pile on or ignore... it is a lot. But it's also super cool! There's so much to do! I think we look forward to realizing that from the start and continuing to build up a library of like sfx and ambience and music and flesh out workflows for making music and visual art and synthesizing that all into a work that really coheres. We've been blown away by the level of craft others have brought to this jam, how often we've been like "you can do that?", and that inspires us to like match that, even if we lack a background in visual art or much of one in music.

I feel like we had more to write. So does B———, but she's been a real space cadet today, which is my fault. Maybe another time.

But before we go, we have to thank you. Like, I know you didn't allow us to do this and I wouldn't be surprised if you demanded we deleted it and if you were the one asking that of us, well, we might do it. But we could not have done this without you. Not just in the sense of like, we wouldn't have had these experiences. But also like, you taught us compassion, you taught us honesty, you taught us the worth of just not giving a single fuck about what someone else might think about doing what you felt you needed to do to make the world right. You taught us love. You taught us hope. You taught us tenacity. And without all that we wouldn't be here right now, finally doing what we have dreamed of.