#however i do appreciate the writing and characterisation and the way that they frame everything in perspective | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yasuda-yoshiya · 5 years

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Are you going to buy a copy of Fatamoru Dreams of the Revenants Edition? I love Imeon primarily because she saved Michel and called Morgana out on her bullshit. As a counterpoint to the The Maid’s rather rushed and disappointing resolution and how to fix it, could you write down all of the positive things about her? What actually worked? The elaborate setup was definitely a factor! You seem very passionate about her, as am I. I hope I’m not annoying you with all these Maid thoughts!

Hmm, I’d really like to buy it, but I don’t own either of the systems it’s been announced for, unfortunately… I might still buy a copy just for the sake of showing support, though, especially since I’m sure I’ll end up looking at videos for the new content anyway. Novectacle definitely deserve it! I really appreciate their commitment to getting all of the games localised and brought over here, even when the sales apparently haven’t been that great. It can’t be easy to arrange such high-quality localisations for games as text-heavy as these, so I’m hugely grateful to them for managing it!

(And yes, Imeon is the best! Appreciate her!!)

Honestly, I love pretty much everything about the Maid’s characterisation prior to door 6! Indirectly characterising her through her background role as the “narrator” through the first four doors was such a unique and fascinating presentational choice; she has a really strong and simultaneously reassuring and unsettling presence as a character that grabbed me very quickly, and all the subtle ways in which she indirectly expresses things about herself through the ways she tells and presents her stories even as she positions herself as an impartial observer felt really exciting and rewarding to pick up on. I think it’s absolutely some of Fata’s best writing in terms of communicating so much through indirect implications and little cues in the ways she talks about herself, the WHG, the mansion etc, without having to resort to straightforward exposition or explicitly putting the focus on her PoV. The whole atmosphere around her is so powerful, too; her piano and affected themes evoke a really strong feeling of quiet tranquility with an underlying deep sadness behind it, which the writing also communicates really well through the descriptions of the lonely dark mansion as the Maid guides you through it. Fata really does do an incredibly good job with atmosphere, and those initial sequences with the Maid stand out as one of the strongest examples of that for me.

And in general, I just think her role in presenting the story and how it influences the way the reader takes it is really interesting and effective? I really remember how the game made me feel a sort of trust and comfort in her presence despite the obviously creepy aspects of her presentation; the game really does communicate a definite feeling of genuine warmth and concern for “you” even through the very formally detached way she expresses it, so it makes you sort of feel like you want to trust the framing of her stories and what she’s presenting to you, even with the ample avidence that’s something is wrong about it. And that’s generally the way you’d expect a game like Fata to be set up, I think; for each of the Maid’s stories to contain all the pieces to solve the mystery of “who you are”, and that then the final story will be about collecting all those pieces together and reaching the truth, even if there might be some obfuscation along the way. So I always found it really cool and impressive how Fata totally turns all those assumptions on their head in the end - most of the Maid’s stories have absolutely nothing to do with Michel, the final door that “gives all the answers” is actually the least real of them all, and the opening arc isn’t really about being helped to remember your story at all - it’s actually about the storyteller trying to push someone else’s story on to you instead, and getting to the heart of their emotional reasons for doing so. Realising that at the end of door 4 totally overturned my perception of the Maid and everything about the story up to that point in such an impactful and memorable way. I’m still sort of vaguely in awe when I think about it.

And what really gets me about that is that the Maid is so good at that role of the storyteller, too, you know? Her act as the all-knowing mentor and guide who knows and understands everything is so incredibly thorough and convincing; she really does narrate the stories and set up the mysteries about things like her unaging nature and the WHG’s reincarnations in a very deliberate and intriguing way, gradually dropping more and more hints to the “correct answers” until culminating with the fourth door that finally puts everything together. The Maid’s constructed narrative is completely and utterly airtight; the only things hinting at something being wrong are the things that you have to deliberately step out of the path the Maid sets out for you to find (the mirror scene, the talk with the painting, the door 4 backlog text), but if you cut those things out and just take the story as the Maid tells you, you could absolutely end the game at door 4 and the story would still make perfect sense. There aren’t any holes or unexplained mysteries; it really does all tie together neatly in isolation.

And letting the reader get so immersed in the Maid’s misleading presentation of that narrative and the meaning behind it just worked so well for me as a presentational choice, because it really makes clear without the game ever having to actually explicitly spell it out or say it why door 4 is so important to the Maid - it’s just so evident in the way that she frames so much of her telling of the first three doors as leading up to toward that ultimate “reveal”, that all-important part of the story that “gives all the answers” and gives a clear meaning and purpose to all that senseless and incomprehensible tragedy. The Maid needed the framework of that story because that’s the only way she could get the comfort and security of clear answers and purpose to her suffering. I really wish I could properly express just how much it shook me when I did first realise at the end of door 4 that her carefully crafted role as the “guide to the story” was a deliberate affectation; I get the impression that people mostly tend to react to the big reveal with confusion more than anything else at first, but I just remember feeling such a painfully piercing sense of clarity and understanding at how painstakingly she’d constructed that role of the storyteller around herself and why she needed it, why someone would choose to detach from themselves and push their own story on to someone else in that way. She really is such a good character with so many conscious and unconscious layers to her thought processes and her ways of expressing herself; I honestly do think she’s portrayed incredibly well in the first half of the story and that will always stick with me, however much the latter parts of the story do admittedly drop the ball on it!

#the house in fata morgana #i could have talked about giselle in door 5 too but #this is probably long enough as it is #so just for the record she is also perfect there ok #best fata character forever

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vroenis · 4 years

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Circa 2009 - 2019

Lede with a picture, righto...

In true style, that’s going to deter the lot, but gotta stay on brand.

To have this discussion, we’re going to need a list. A musical timeline of sorts with the exception of four key events;

2002 Balance 003 (compiled and mixed by Bill Hamel) 2008 Jóhann Jóhannsson, Fordlandia 2009 Telefon Tel Aviv, Immolate Yourself 22nd January - Charles Cooper dies Tosca, No Hassle Hildur Guðnadóttir, Without Sinking

2010 Jóhann Jóhannsson, And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees 2011 Bon Iver, self titled 2012 Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man 2013 13th January - Kentucky Route Zero Act I is first released Andrew Bayer, If It Were You, We'd Never Leave Darkside, Psychic The Haxan Cloak, Excavation 2014 Siavash Amini, Til Human Voices Wake Us 2015 Björk, Vulnicura Siavash Amini, Subsiding Jóhann Jóhannsson, Sicario (original soundtrack)

2016 The 1975, I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It 2017 Björk, Utopia Siavash Amini, TAR 2018 9th February - Jóhann Jóhannsson dies 29th June - Bill Hamel dies Andrew Bayer, In My Last Life The 1975, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships Siavash Amini, FORAS Skee Mask, Compro 2019 Siavash Amini, SERUS Apparat, LP5 Telefon Tel Aviv, Dreams Are Not Enough

While I’ve added a precursor of two albums to give context to two of the events that happen in the timeline, it is effectively book-ended by the two most recent albums from Telefon Tel Aviv. These albums form a frame in which so many things have happened - in my life, and seemingly in the lives of others. Some clearly in the events so evident and unavoidable, painfully so and still lingering in the minds and emotions of those they directly affect and us in the periphery who only have the most faintest of contact yet still seem to perceive ourselves significantly touched. By this I mean the death of Charles Cooper - if I feel devastated, having only ever been had an impression of his character via the channel of his art, there isn’t a universe in which I can possibly imagine what Joshua Eustis’ daily experience is, so I can’t and won’t speak to it.

And I guess that’s where the story begins.

In 2009 my best friend who remains so to this day plays me Immolate Yourself for the first time - bearing in mind they and I are slightly different people, probably me more-so than they. Our tastes in music have always been fairly broad. We’ve never been haters of pop-music at all, they’ve always embraced pop more than I but I’ve always appreciated pop. In by brief stint industry-side when I was professionally working, I did form an appreciation for the labour, but in general I still maintain a high appreciation for the craft. In any industry there will always be a valuable critique of culture and bad culture exists everywhere. We must always work to protect the vulnerable at all times, no excuses, and erode imbalances of power.

Back to 2009. The album blows us both away and I’m fairly confident in speaking for us both, changes us forever. We both have immense music libraries having purchased music constantly from young ages, but no matter what we cycle through or have in rotation, Immolate Yourself has always been evergreen. Not to say it’s in daily rotation constantly - it’s not exactly that kind of album. It’s highly emotionally charged and a demanding listen, and sometimes I am listening to it once a day for a given period, but it certainly is highly mood-dependent - more-so than some of the other music in my collection which is completely fine in that not all art has to be hitting at that level.

I remember our conversations about Charles, how shattered we were, our conversations about suicide, mental health - please be aware that at the time, it was rumoured Charles Cooper’s death was due to suicide but later several reports ruled that it wasn’t. That’s that. The purpose of bringing it up is to give context to R and my discussions. Some years prior I had my own mental health diagnosis clarified and had seen some improvements on and off with my personal management, but the rigours of life still presented challenges significant enough to cause extreme frustration, anger and anxiety. I’d say these days, in the year of our Synth Lordz 2020, I’m doing much better and on better medication management and that would still be true.

I don’t go looking for articles or interviews with Joshua Eustis about what his life has been life at all or how things are for him now. I do follow him on twitter and we’ve had a few great, unrelated exchanges. When I bought and had my first listen-through of Dreams Are Not Enough last year, I told him I wanted to delete the rest of my music collection which of-course is hyperbole and he knows that, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere (this almost always means Instagram), I always want to have these extreme responses to art. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but it has to be at regular intervals, even if they’re separated by long periods of time. Art is so important to me. Sometimes I joke - love you don’t have to work to receive, but art takes labour. Maybe I’m not joking (typical artist wank :P )

Apparat (Sascha Ring) was one of those artists I never bought back in 2009 but he was always in the playlists, always at the festivals. Maybe he did remixes? Or his music was being remixed. I dug his stuff, it was pretty cool, but back then he was probably in the periphery for me. He, like many for me, faded into the background. Because I follow Joshua/Telefon on Twitter, I randomly see a retweet or an exchange between him and Apparat, probably about software or plugins etc., and think far-out, Apparat’s still around... and he released an album in March (2019). I’m going to go have a bit of a listen and if it’s good HOLY SHIT...

To help me characterise what I hear when I listen to LP5, I’ve included a very important album from Tosca, interestingly released at the beginning of our bookend; No Hassle. I don’t really know what the zeitgeist is on this album, but my completely uninformed instinct is to say it’s not popular. For me, tho, No Hassle is absolutely divine. It’s an astonishing listen because it’s in some ways *unexciting* - it’s a severely sober listen. There’s next to no energy in it at all, even when Richard and Rupert dare to tilt into a major key, they’re still listlessly meandering along as if they got up too late or are still sitting in an old sofa or are just happy enough to be strolling and the conversation is good enough at a moderate level before we head back down as the sun sets and the night swallows everything up. It’s an album I listen to almost exclusively in the car during night drives, or in either my house or in hotels, airports, any other environment but always when it’s dark. Cheesily I call these works “Midnight Albums”, and I tend to characterise them as serious listening, when I’m feeling meditative, pensive, neutral, dead-sticking, however you may wish to describe the sensation.

LP5 is along very similar veins for me and it strikes me as extremely interesting. Sascha didn’t exactly disappear for 10 years, his wiki page lists two other albums in 2011 and 2013 respectively as well as other collaborations and work, but to me, just the sound of this album strikes me as particularly unique to being distinct from the years gone by. That sounds like a redundant statement - that might be true of everything altho with art I often don’t think that’s the case at all, but when I first heard LP5, I thought Sascha - shit’s happened to you. I don’t know what it is, but then I figure...

Shit’s happened to us all.

Anyone well inducted into the Anjunabeats cult (lol it’s a joke, you can laugh - I’m a fellow cultist) of trance will be familiar with Andrew Bayer. A good thing the Anjuna label seems to be doing and more of of late, is funnelling some of their phat stacks of cash to their talent so they can actually record full albums if they wish, a venture which I’m sure isn’t profitable for them in any way unless they go on tour, contingent of-course on the material being shoppable. I’m sure that makes Spencer Brown a darling - not having a go at him, I love both his albums to death, they’re amazing, but I genuinely don’t think there’s any pressure on the artist to produce tourable music. I feel Andrew has the latitude to do whatever he wants, and he works at the shoppable remixes because it’s fun for him and they have a wonderful community of talent in constant contact with one another so the opportunities are there.

In 2013, Andrew Bayer releases his album which upon hearing I instantly buy. It’s a pretty neat departure from all things trance - it’s beaty, synthy, broken samples and pushing at ambient at times. Then I get to the amazing last track titled “Closing Act”. This is 100% without question inspired by and styled after the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson.

On the 9th of February, 2018, Jóhann Jóhannsson dies.

I’ve just come back from stepping away from this writing for about two hours. I appreciate people interact with art, artists, performers and people of varying level of exposure (read: celebrities) in different ways so let’s just bypass any discussion of how other people behave. It’s fine. As for me, I try to maintain what I believe to be a healthy sense of distance from people of cultural note. They’re still people; human beings, and I don’t know them. Actors and musicians had died before, artists I’d “grown up with”, admired etc., but Jóhann‘s death struck me with force. It still haunts me.

Why?

I don’t know him. I never knew him. For all I know, he may have been an arsehole to everyone around him. I had to and still interrogate my emotional response and I very much do it with the greatest of intent. Is it stupendously capitalist? Am I so entrenched in my lust for his music? His product? That is literally all I can say I know of him; what he produced - what he gave, what he offered. Is it because I want more? No - not really. There are artists still alive who have chosen not to offer more and I have no problem accepting this. There are artists who have more to offer and aren’t able to due to the economics of power and the power of economics and I’m certainly angry about that while they’re alive. I grieved for Jóhann. I was so upset. I shut myself in my studio and cried.

In some way, regardless of not knowing anything at all about the circumstances of his death, I felt that we had all failed.

Knowing even in the smallest element that mental health was a contributing factor to his life and death leads me to make assumptions about the kind of world he may have existed in, what his experience may have been. Regardless of whatever differences there might be between his experiences, now finite, and my own, I still believe there is justification to draw parallels. Not because he’s semi-famous, but because we are both humans, and that it is known he struggled with mental health. It is as much about known, documented and shared stories of services, medications and social experiences as it is about everything that is unspoken that all people with mental health concerns know. We may not know to what degree we might have commonalities, but the one thing we may have in common is that there are so many things we cannot share - speak, or expose, and there are things at times we feel we must not expose in order to survive. It is at this point I must emphasise that health professionals will always dispense such advise as “You’re never alone/you never have to carry burdens alone” etcetera etcetera and I value the intention in such actions. I’m here to appreciate the goodwill behind such advice, but purely by nature of existence, we are each of us alone - this is not an emotional fact, this is simply reality. You cannot inhabit our bodies and minds and live our lives for us - nor can you overcome our physiological concerns internally on our behalf. You can offer us medications but it is still we who have to bear the process of evaluating whether we can endure the experience of synthesising them.

Professionals need to always respect that fact and never forget it.

This is key when I interrogate my emotional response and reaction to Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s death. I don’t know what treatments he may have been receiving but I also don’t know what his life experience was, because treatment in and of itself is less than one half of the equation, perhaps not even a third. The total texture of a human’s experience is woven from so many fibres; and one of them is the cultural response of the people surrounding them, from the immediate individuals to generalised language in use within earshot to advertising unwillingly overheard to adopted via accepted use over time to idioms adopted when people have literally no idea what words mean and what they can mean and how they can directly affect others.

Am I blaming this nebulous spectre of Society? Of-course not. Am I wanting to focus a microscope on the microcosm of communities within this idea of Society or induce guilt on individuals? Also no. But there is still a sensation of endemic guilt and carelessness that we do not make better attempts, perhaps not even to approach a comprehensive understanding of mental health, but at least to triage some of the casual damage we do by being completely careless with it with poor cultural practice. It’s such a difficult thing to speak to because the terms are at one moment so specific and yet the next so generalised. What are we to do? How can we improve when it’s no-one’s fault and yet everyone’s fault? How can we be effective if we want to discard useless, terrible and outdated ideas like blame and backwards accountability and yet we haven’t even begun to understand how the shape of our behaviour is having such devastating effects?

The cost is literally human life.

The interrogation goes further. Why only Jóhann? Why don’t I mourn every death? At the risk of diverting to whataboutism, it’s still worth asking, because it’s clear I valued his life because of his art, and it can’t be avoided that I list Bill Hamel for the same reason. Balance 003 is for me the best collection of minimal trance in history and there has never been another since, the genre has evolved and as yet has not been revisited. Bill himself joined with some friends to work on some more upbeat and detailed music but then himself died in June of 2018, but I wasn’t to find out for months and again, was shattered. I didn’t know Bill either but there were more anecdotal accounts of his personality available online, and they certainly were glowing and positive, and that’s how I think of him - fondly, regardless of not knowing him.

Later in 2018 Andrew Bayer released his next album. It’s a collection of vocal pieces, and the final song is titled End Of All Things. Eerily but welcomed, many of its musical stylings begin to resemble Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s, and Alison May lends her voice to lyrics that include the following;

Roll down the aisle You were bold to go first With a fist to the earth

I don’t like to quote a lot of lyrics, and you can look the rest of them up if you want, but if you do, like me, you might interpret the song to be about death. I don’t know if Andrew Bayer wrote this for Jóhann Jóhannsson, or only for him or at all. He probably wrote it for someone else entirely, probably someone he actually personally knew. Maybe he just wrote it about death in general. It doesn’t matter because for me it was the first catalyst in musical form for processing Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s death in some dimension. It wouldn’t be until much later, when Justin/Telefon Tel Aviv retweeted Siavash Amini that I’d find art as powerful as Jóhann's and Andrew’s and of-course Justin’s own, but each artist is their own texture and I listen to them all in different ways when in different moods.

2019 - Dreams Are Not Enough

There is so much more writing I can do with this short list of albums. I’m at 2800+ words and I’ve barely scratched the surface. That first, dull image at the top of the piece is the directory structure of my music collection, replicated on the hard-drive that goes into my car and on my personal music player - I don’t use my phone for music. While I do listen to music from every directory over time, of late I’m gravitating more and more to two main folders; Ultimate and Survival, and almost all of the music from the list in this piece comes from those two directories with only one or two exceptions.

I’m a bit miffed I didn’t get to write about The 1975, there’s some great stuff to be said about their work and I’ve written about them before, but I have so much more to say, especially culminating with Love It If We Made It as a generational, cultural proclamation. We’re on the verge of the new album tho (time of writing is 29th February 2020) so who knows, maybe I’ll get the opportunity to be topical with that but knowing me, I’ll still bury it behind a wall of text but that will be for the better, I’m sure.

I need to close on Dreams Are Not Enough, tho, and also Kentucky Route Zero. I think I’ve mentioned it before - completing Kentucky Route Zero was the catalyst for me to start writing again, and it’s there in the timeline that the first act released in January of 2013. Last tumblr entry, I briefly touched on being in a holding pattern until KRZ was completed by its developer, Cardboard Computer, and since completing it, I’ve gone off socials which means I’ve greatly diminished my activity on social media and returned to long-format writing. This entry and the last on tumblr are very much evidence of that. Way back in 2013 when I first completed that first act, Kentucky Route Zero was one of those seminal experiences I felt was made just for me. After years of playing all sorts of traditional video games, I’d grown tired of their play dynamics in many senses. I still liked traditional games, and in some ways still do now, but I will always hunger for boundaries to be pushed, for greater things to be said, for things to be said and done in conjunction and in parallel; in layers and simultaneously; artfully, with complexity and subtlety, or with simplicity but with great humanity and maturity. I remember watching Serial Experiments: Lain, the first episode and feeling like it was made just for me, and then that feeling being amplified a million times over with Haibane Renmei and Texhnolyze. There are reasons these works are so rare and so unpopular. Again - I’ll reaffirm I still love a lot of pop and there’s nothing wrong with generalised and widely celebrated art at all, a lot of it’s cool. But when you find something so unique that speaks so much to your experience in a way that’s powerful to the point of dialect...

That is what Kentucky Route Zero and Porpentine’s Howling Dogs are to me.

That’s what these albums are to me, and Telefon Tel Aviv’s albums somehow have book-ended this period in my life. Each album captures a facet of turbulence, of emotion, probably a little bit of joy, or chaos and a healthy dose of hedonism too, but I have other music for that and I tend not to talk about it much. I’m sure joy and euphoria can be complicated for others and that’s cool, but it’s not something I feel drawn to discuss.

All of this art, this Art Worth Dying For, seems to be the only thing I can engage with at the moment, in the wake of completing Kentucky Route Zero. I have shooty shooty games sitting on the Playstation that I once did really enjoy and probably will again, I don’t know. But right now I can’t bear the thought of booting them up. I think about some of the films I was keen to see some months ago and right now they look like noise, indistinct, boring to the point of textureless, falvourless null-space. I don’t mean to insult these works in any way at all, I’m not trying to diminish their value by saying by comparison to KRZ, they’re bad. Not at all. I don’t seem to be able to process them. The closest thing I can describe is the kind of mood disorders, dysthymia being one of them, doctors used to try and diagnose me with before they knew I was bipolar; a literal chemical barrier that’s preventing me from comprehending and interpreting the data I’m being presented with. I’ve lost hold of the cultural frame I’m supposed to have to understand how to place these objects in reference to my sense of entertainment and engagement.

So instead I come here and talk to myself with barely an objective in mind, other than to perhaps share my thoughts with you. And some music that I’m hoping you’ll buy. I know I’m a pain in the arse for that, and I know buying music is an immensely privileged thing to be able to do - I get it. You don’t have to buy everything right away, but if you want me to make a case for it, let me know and I will, I’ll even make a case for small steps i.e., even when you can’t afford much and how to spend a really tiny amount. Otherwise proceed as normal and click onto the next visual diary, nothing to see here.

#chrono #2020 #music #Jóhann Jóhannsson #Bill Hamel #Telefon Tel Aviv #Apparat #Andrew Bayer #Kentucky Route Zero #mental health #psychiatry #language #art worth living for #art worth dying for #Dreams Are Not Enough #writing about music

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historiesofabody · 6 years

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‘transparency’ - message from D. to S., July 2018

Thu, Jul 26 2018

7:58 PM

S__,

I told you previously that I would not be contacting you again, and therefore I will not be expecting you to reply to or even read this, especially considering its length.

I have decided to contact you because I do not want our last interaction to be the one that defines us, and I want to take this opportunity to treat you with the consideration and care that I also hope for from you.

In the months following our last exchange, I have felt more and more uncomfortable with how I treated you, as well as [your partner], in those communications. I realised that, despite my resolutions to have changed and moved beyond the grip of our relationship, I had lapsed directly back into our abusive dynamic. When you defended yourself against my statements, my response was impulsive, destructive and emotionally irresponsible. I attacked you with aggression, viciousness and showed a complete lack of consideration for what I had actually wanted to achieve by contacting you.

To be clear, I am not retracting my statements about your behaviour towards me during our relationship. That violence was real, and its' impacts have been long lasting. However, I realise that, despite demanding intensive reflection and self-criticism from you, I was both overly punitive and wilfully misrepresentative in my approach. I did not offer space for the nuances or complexity that characterised our interaction. I was, at that time, unable to navigate my response to our relationship without casting you as the sole abuser and myself as the helpless victim. I can understand how you might not have recognised yourself in my descriptions of you. I thought that confronting you in that manner would bring me closure. It has only caused me further grief and anger, along with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness – perhaps it has done much the same to you.

I want to take this opportunity to be more transparent. I was not entirely helpless in our relationship. I was misguided and misled by you, but not completely oblivious. I often fought back, hard, and I also caused you pain. I soon saw you for what you became around me and saw what we did to each other, but I did not make enough attempts to help you or myself escape that. I stayed with you, not just out of fear but also because I think by that point we were traumatically bonded, and were as emotionally dependent on each other as we were emotionally abusive. I was afraid of you, but also of what I became around you. I felt that I was under your control, to the extent that I never considered that I maybe frightened you or that you felt frightened by my destructive behaviour towards you or myself. I felt trapped and isolated but never considered that you felt the same.

Your suggestion that we were merely unhealthy only reminded me how difficult we always found it to express how much our interaction damaged us. You may not agree, but I feel certain that we were unable or unwilling to communicate and work through any feelings of vulnerability with each other. You always insisted I couldn't hurt you and I particularly remember your assertion that I would always suffer more than you; so I started fights to show you that I could, and that I wouldn't.

You have previously refuted that I ever caused you any harm and if that is your experience, then I must accept that. We should each be free to deal with our experiences as we see fit.

Nevertheless, I wish to take responsibility for the harm that I (at the very least) intended and I want now to sincerely express that I was wrong to treat you the way I did. No matter how badly you treated me, that does not justify or excuse my actions. I could've sought different ways to challenge, de-escalate or escape your abuse other than threatening you or being physically violent towards you, because other options were available. I was just as guilty of not showing you the compassion that you also withheld from me. You may not deserve my forgiveness now, but you also did not deserve to be punished then, and my reprisals against you only served to reinforce a cycle of violence that further damaged us both.

I should acknowledge, too, that our relationship was not entirely characterised by violence and abuse. I know there were times, mostly early on, when we were very typical teenagers who believed we loved each other and were relatively, innocently happy. I cannot think of those times with any fondness or pleasure now, but I know that, at the time, these initial moments of calm and tenderness were what convinced me we should stay together even as the abuse escalated. Of course, our dynamic was such that the worse the fight, the more intense and committed the reconciliation and so the pattern continued until we were permanently exhausted and resentful.

When you wrote in your September email that you never intended to hurt me, it triggered a particularly intense objection from me. I've since begun to consider that our relationship challenged you, as it challenged both of us, to be vulnerable and open. We were both too afraid to be so. You did not set out to hurt me, but you wished to maintain power and control, and hurting me made that possible. I believe you needed to see me struggle because it stopped you from feeling vulnerable, not necessarily because it brought you pleasure. When it came to sexual coercion, I don't think you particularly enjoyed assuming or contravening my consent, but simply that my agency did not matter to you at all. I think you felt I was punishing you by witholding sex from you, and that it was your right to take what I wouldn't give by way of manipulation and psychological pressure. You never considered that my gestures of refusal, reluctance, discomfort or full psychotic disassociation at such times signified how violated, distressed and trapped you made me feel.

The way you treated me - the way we treated each other - was the result of a severe lack of care or consideration, mostly (I think) because we each believed the other was stronger, more unfeeling, more in control. As you pointed out, our dynamic was such that you held the majority of the power, which you consequently abused. Unfortunately, our relationship was consistently framed by both of us as a struggle for dominance when it should have been a safe and caring environment.

I do not think I had very good models of care to offer you. Though we never acknowledged it, I brought a lot of past trauma into our relationship. I had a neglected childhood and was abused by a family friend from the age of eleven. You never wanted to talk about the past, yours or mine. I have wondered many times whether you too had traumatic experiences when you were younger that lay the foundations for your behaviour. I theorise this because I believe that abusive behaviours are not innate but learnt and later deployed as survival mechanisms. When I am feeling particularly compassionate, I wonder if perhaps we recognised and felt drawn to the pain, loneliness and difference in the other, but that we were simply not emotionally strong enough to support each other, and instead put everything we had into avoiding any real intimacy.

I don't think I will ever be able to fully articulate why we felt it was so necessary to bait and punish each other so much. Reading past diary entries, I am shocked at our sustained campaigns of aggression against each other. Neither of us can go back and make that right. Instead, I am simply grateful that it did eventually end and that perhaps now we have both found healthier and safer spaces to recover and have a necessary distance from that time.

This brings me to my final statement, which I hope you will appreciate is difficult to disclose. You suggested that I was 'haunted' by our relationship but I don't think that is the case. I spent many years after our break-up completely avoiding thinking about it, you or how I might have been affected by it. The reason I contacted [your partner], and then you, almost a decade after our interaction ended, was because of a series of realisations and events that pushed me to un-repress and reassess my life up until to that point.

In early 2016, I realised that I was neither a girl nor a woman, and, to put it in somewhat cold clinical terms, have since pursued physical and social 'transition', including changing my name. Once I had this distance from my experiences as [deadname], I was overwhelmed by insights and embodied understandings that I had never had access to before. I had spent much of my life disassociated and detached, where things had happened to my body, but not to me. Our relationship was one of those remote experiences that landed most heavily and mercilessly when I began to identify fully with myself.

I have allowed myself to wonder whether my repressed gender identity had an impact on our relationship. It is a source of some pain to me that perhaps if I had just been a cis teenage boy, we could've been friends, or something else, and made something better out of our inexplicable but genuine connection. For some reason, in hindsight, our relationship makes far more sense to me as a very fraught, closeted queer relationship, rather than a deeply dysfunctional heterosexual one. But these are theories, not facts. By committing to them, I run the risk of problematising my identity rather than engaging in the real work of responsibility and reflection. That work is daunting and difficult but should not, to my mind, be purposely painful or punishing. Despite what my previous statements suggested, it is not my intention to see you suffer.

Please don't think I expect anything from you. If you've read this far, then I'm grateful for your engagement. Writing this has in turns made me feel relieved, appalled, frustrated. I don't hold out hope that we will ever be able to interact with each other in a way that doesn't elicit frustration, disruption or violates each other's boundaries. I don't anticipate you will conform to my perspective on our relationship, mostly because we have always been incomparably different, with distinct and irreconcilable emotional realities.

I'll admit I wrote this for myself and my own healing, and when I say I hope that we were an exception, that you will never hurt anyone the way you did me, it is not just another attack but a sincere desire, an investment in the possibility for transformation that I wish to see realised in myself just as much as I wish it for you.

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