Another goodbye, sort of.  It was a good weekend, and now I'm left with an interesting set of feelings as I float in the void between two sides of life.  My best friend talked about a duality before, of feeling like there were two different worlds they lived in, and often it felt as though the other one was never real to begin with.  I won't say that I share exactly the same feelings; things are much different, after all.  But I definitely feel a bit of that skepticism, that sense of "will things really be alright back on the other side?"  Even though I know that once my feet are on the ground, I will feel like I am at home again.

I'm not quite sure exactly what else I should write about here.  I could of course detail the things that I actually did this past weekend, but I feel like that is not very relevant to share here.  I guess instead I can talk about what the next chapter looks like right now.

Right now, in my near future, there's some chicky stuff to take care of, and a fair chunk of music work to do -- both for a commission of mine, and also for my own game.  Past that, I actually imagine it'll be a lot of just...preparing for next month.  October is the busy part of the year, with both the Ludum Dare game jam event as well as letter-writing, so I often need to get a head start on the work in the middle of September.  For Ludum Dare, there's no guarantee that we'll do another game in a similar style as the last two, but the most recent one showed me that there are still a lot of common functionalities that I'd like to robustly incorporate into my base starter code.  That is something that will take some time to work out.  And of course, there is finishing up the entry back from April.  And writing some ~4 or so of the 31 Christmas letters ahead of time.

There is also, however, a desire to step back from it all for a bit.  Perhaps, to process some of the feelings that I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post.  I'm not sure if this desire is transient or whether it is something that I will end up acting on concretely -- it's hard to tell until I am actually back on solid ground.  My guess is that the truth lies somewhere in between.  And of course, like all things in my life, the answer will involve a gradual incorporation of both.  An everyday balance.

It is one thing to want something for so long and then to realize that you will never reach it.  It is another thing to come to the understanding that you will still keep trying despite knowing that you will never reach it.  And it is still yet another thing to realize that what you believed in was a lie all along.

When I first learned the story of Sayaka Miki I think it was difficult for me to resonate with her struggle keenly.  I understood the tragedy of her story, but I saw her as brash, naive, and stubborn.  However, I wrote in 2013 in that I realized some things that made me feel like I started to understand her struggle a bit more.  I think I had begun to understand the idea of believing in something flawed, and had a greater appreciation of that "stubbornness".  And I also realize now the feeling of being betrayed by an ideal.  You could argue that Sayaka's naivety makes her story more "human".  That this is a flaw in her character, one that makes it resonant.  I think that's true to some extent, but humans are not the only species that are naive.  Perhaps what makes her struggle truly human is her struggle to maintain her beliefs despite being proven wrong.  In a way you could say this is an attachment to the past -- a sort of sunk-cost fallacy, if you will.  But I think it's more than that, too.  The idea of choosing to spend effort on something that is known to ultimately be futile, I think is something that feels to me to be uniquely human.  Like most good stories, Sayaka's portrayal to me doesn't have a defined single message or "moral" -- indeed, her story resolves in different ways depending on the universe.  I think this is by nature, as you can't simply "fix" this struggle by finding an answer.  It is simply something to be experienced and to learn your way through.