i downloaded this back almost right after it came out after seeing a multitude of week-one reviews that put a distant pang of fear in my chest about how it would even really affect me to read this. i don't really know how to explain the specific way i got scared to read it. i told a friend of mine, who has since hurt me in ways i am still recovering from and who i talked to about this game literally tonight, that i was going to do it when it felt right to. perhaps that is all overdramatic for a visual novel? perhaps it is not. art is all what you make of it
that ended up being at about 9:30p just two days before a thanksgiving where i'll go get deadnamed by my parents in their third total apartment since the place i grew up in, which makes me think of horrible things that were done to me and that i did to other people and a life that i live with every day even though it is so far behind me today
reading through this was sickening in ways i have never felt over anything that wasn't something i did myself. it has left me with a dry mouth and an empty stomach and an ache in my ribs and a sense of familiarity with parts of my psyche and the psyches of others and the life i lived and the lives those around me lived that has me feeling things i genuinely do not know how to describe. this is a work of fiction that alienates me on the grounds that it feels like it understands a part of me i don't fully get myself, which is a description i'm not even confident in
at the same time i do not like a single character in this vn and yet despite this i like them very much. love them all with my whole heart, even. i am able to see things in them that i see in myself and everyone i know who's like me and it's left my body suffocated, claustrophobic, yet too vast, too exposed, too vulnerable, for my liking too
i do not think i have ever read something like this. i do not think i will ever read something like this. i wish i had it in me to write something like this and by god it's making me want to try to put my heart down on paper too
i think this stuck with me in ways nothing else ever will