Discordant thoughts clamoring in my head, draping over an oppressive painting. Those are the only words to describe the feelings of me,, working with the work and attempting to understand the message. What I can only do now is do my best to put them into the right boxes, and for something this deeply abstract maybe that's a bad idea, because chipping away trying to make tangible thoughts from something that is indirectly getting me to tears is hard. But here they are nonetheless.

Personal attempts to cut off nails, skin, objects until what's left is something pure. Abandoning the remnants behind and not realizing what they meant for us, actions to escape reality that we justify in religious vessels. The ending hurt the hardest when I realized myself that othering was in some ways done to escape memory, yet for Ori that was considered pollution. The noise was erased when his projection upon what we know as Rem was murdered so he could escape that past and move to the future, yet there was something more human in keeping to that past, remembering the individuality even though pain came with it. And yet it was also the path that had the most 'alien' abstract feelings.

I don't know, it's hard for me to sit down and wrestle with the dichotomy of future vs. past on display. I had thoughts about the religious angle, because it's certainly a side of me i've deeply estranged, not wanting to wrestle with faith and what comes with it. Faith in ourselves is the main goal, that's the positive message I suppose, but I don't feel satisfied with that. I don't like being so unsure about my thoughts and maybe that is what was the most painful about this work. Being terrified that maybe my perspective is too small, that i'm toying with a world too complex and large for me to rationalize.

Maybe I wanted to sleep in the tub like Ori, forget it all, and move on. Just wanted to keep going keep going keep going towards some invisible semblance of the future. In a sense I get what these puzzles now serve for, "Rem" says it flat out that they're simple lessons and constructs but maybe I really do need that all spelt out for me, do I. Trial and error until I get it and then act like I've learned something.

The playing cards really get to me, I think it was about halfway through where I tried thinking more on what they're for. Like yes the celestials are "traumas" but what's probably more fucked up is how they inadvertently commercialized them in-universe into some 'other' collector's item that you get on multiple runs. There's poems that feel absent almost from the goal of not feeling those painful emotions again but then again that we rationalize it as some rng story we kind of metacontextually see it as a narrative and nothing more.

It's all enough to give me a headache, I can't deal with abstract stuff maybe. Trying to think further is just making me find messages I don't agree with, stuff I don't want to move on with. Nothing satisfying and making me feel worse like I'm putting up paintings of awful realizations and then not knowing where to go with any of them.

I want to throw these thoughts into the void and see if anyone responds to them with something that's more comforting and helps me get them together, for now.