"I must surrender myself to the sun and dust that turned me into bleached stone. / To be free I must surrender myself until nothing is left but a petrified form, one that I neither recognize nor one that I call home. / Only then can my spirit rest, as I am bereft of all past pain. A red flower will grow to mark my grave / For it is in this horrible surrender that I learned to fly."
"But please... I can't... I won't... this is my form... / I don't want to die."
How absolutely fucking heartbreaking. Just imagining — no, feeling — when a person or people or entity or just some external force lends your body into a mortar and pestles and crushes you into a pulp, until your only option is to give up and give into their expectations or wants, completely disregarding what is important to you. It's such a hauntingly accurate depiction (at least i think) of the queer experience (especially for me, living under a homophobic household). maybe I'm interpreting this game wrongly but seeing the lines of this poem made me imagine being forced into submission or more specifically (under my interpretation) being forced into denying one's own self for the homogenization into one bigger being (like dissolving everything in the butterfly's world and flying into a bigger butterfly's nest). it's like, anti-individual. regardless of how much this game actually is about the queer experience, it certainly still has the theme of letting go of something, something important, against your own will. it just tugs my heart at all the right ways. it's definitely incredibly bittersweet. thank you so much for this.