(spoilers for all of Sayonara Wild Hearts below)

"Sayonara Wild Heart"

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a game about not always knowing what's going on, and that being okay. From any moment, you could be riding a skateboard down a Rainbow Road-esque track, running on the sides of buildings chasing down masked twins, or fighting a giant three-headed wolf mech. The game transitions between cutscene and gameplay seamlessly. It's so seamless, in fact, that a common experience with the game is of dying because the player didn't realize they had regained control of the main character. The player controls one of two characters depending on the level, either an unnamed young woman with a short haircut and a longboard, or The Fool, a woman with a dashing suit and scarf to accompany her ball mask and tight bun. Sayonara Wild Hearts is many things, but more than anything else it's a pop album experience, an interactive accompaniment to a stellar soundtrack in the style of CHVRCHES or Anamanaguchi. And like all good music, Sayonara Wild Hearts is here to tell you a story.

Loading the game sends the player into an opening cinematic narrated, like the rest of the game, by Queen Latifah. Each narration has a lyricism to it, falling into bars that the subtitles help demarcate. They have their own rhythm and flow. It's fitting for Queen Latifah, even if her last studio album was released 10 years ago. The opening narration sets the stage. A young woman, in a town much like your own, was very happy, until her heart broke so violently that her sorrow echoed through space and time. The title card appears, and the lyrics to the title song "Sayonara Wild Hearts" begins to play: "Something's changed / And I didn't know / You're slipping away / Everything is strange / Please don't let go / Sleep away the pain". Like plenty of pop albums before it, Sayonara Wild Hearts is simple at its core: it's a breakup album. As the last words of the song ring out ("Don't say / Sayonara wild heart"), you, or the skater girl, or The Fool, or somebody, has been told goodbye. After all, who hasn't been broken up with? It's no wonder that so many pop albums can focus on this part of our lives -- so many of us have experienced heartbreak, have gone through the pains of a torturous breakup, and have such... unresolved emotions around these experiences, that the palliative tones of synth music and soothing vocals can help us to, if nothing else, smooth those emotions over. To find, if not justice, if not even peace, then respite, if only for a brief interlude.

There's one breakup for me that never seems to go away. And it's hard for me to talk about for... too many reasons. I think the thing I'm most afraid of is that people won't believe me. Or they'll tell me that it's not that big a deal, or that I should've been able to handle it since I was older than he was, or something. One of those lines that keeps bouncing around inside my head whenever it comes up in my thoughts, let alone talking to other people about it. A thought that tries to convince me the hurt and pain I feel is fake or wrong. Or, felt. It's in the past now. Mostly. But it keeps finding a way to wriggle up again, to pick at the scab just before it's fully healed.

"Fighting Hearts"

As the game's first level opens, Queen Latifah introduces us to a "harmonious universe beyond ours", where some interloper has stolen all the harmony and packed it into her and her star-crossed allies' "vile hearts". Like so many art forms around wordplay, I marvel at how difficult it must be to attempt localizing this game to other languages, because the game plays throughout with the ambiguity of the soundalike terms "vile heart" and "wild heart". Even in the opening song, is the singer begging her partner not to say "Sayonara, wild heart" to her? Or is her partner the wild heart, who'd just say "Sayonara"? It's unclear. It's not supposed to be clear. And that's just fine. The three matriarchs of this once-harmonious other universe, though, had an ace up their sleeve -- or rather, a tarot card: The Fool. "A heroine from the shards of a broken heart", as Queen Latifah describes her, the tarot card turns into a butterfly, who flies into the skater girl's bedroom and wakes her up. With little warning, gravity turns upside down. The skater girl and the butterfly fall out the skylight along with the skater girl's longboard. Debussy's Clair de Lune is playing, and gameplay begins. You guide the skater girl from side to side to collect hearts and diamonds. At the end of the level, the skater girl catches the butterfly, and turns into The Fool herself, before flying through a heart-shaped hole in space, a portal to somewhere else that the next level carries us through.

For the next five sets of levels, you find yourself pursuing and fighting different antagonists, the vile hearts alluded to in the opening narration. And in the way that I've found myself frequently wishing I could do after painful breakups, The Fool proceeds to hunt down those who have wronged the universe, punch them so hard they turn into a polygonal heart, and shatter them. In the way perhaps only a psychedelic neon pop music video can, it feels righteous, beautiful even, without being gruesome. After all, in how many video games before have I punched or killed? Of course, in this one as before, I must right the ship that these vile hearts have undone. It is only natural that I fight to do so.

I had moved. After I graduated from the university situated in the same city I grew up in, I had known it was time for me to leave. The breakup colored it as well; it was a chance for a breath of fresh air, to find somewhere new where I wouldn't carry my baggage around so obviously. But on this particular week, I was back in town, and a friend of mine was having a party. I reached out, sure of the answer but wanting to be polite and confirm that I could come. I was, to my surprise, rebuffed. "Well, your ex, he already said he wanted to come. And I don't want there to be a scene." I did not handle it gracefully. Over the course of the ensuing argument, I began to feel like I was being told something I found ridiculous. That, if I wanted to participate in anything with this group of friends back home, I'd need to register my even being back in town in advance. This way, my friend could properly plot how to have an event where me and my ex would never cross paths. It was even expressed to me (though I will admit this was under the pressure of an emotionally charged discussion, so take it with a grain of salt) that it wasn't me they were worried about blowing up and causing a scene. My ex had substance abuse problems when I dated him, and apparently those hadn't gone away in the time since. In hindsight, I suppose that serves as some confirmation of my experiences with him, but at the time it felt hollow when accompanied by a mealymouthed "Well, he said you were shitty too, so it's not like I can really believe either of you."

"Begin Again"

After the first heart-shaped portal jump, The Fool meets the Dancing Devils in Hatehell Valley, a bouncing neon city of low-rise buildings, steep roads, and streetcars. Each set of levels starts with an introduction to the scene, then a few sequences of fighting or chasing the antagonist(s) for that locale, then a final fight level. The final fight levels are the only ones whose songs have lyrics, marking them solidly as the closest thing Sayonara Wild Hearts has to boss fights. In this first set, the boss song's name is "Begin Again". "Don't you know how it goes? / You leave me sad and scarred / Broken glass, smokin' ash / I guess that's what we are" sings the vocalist, and who can't relate? Feeling like the leftovers after something, broken apart, sharp. Be careful as you clean me up -- don't let me prick your skin and make you bleed.

As The Fool chases down the three Dancing Devils, who wear pink masks with points like devil horns and varsity jackets, the song continues. "I have tried to forget / All the pain and regret / It's the last time / It's the last time tonight / As you hold me so close / In your arms I just know / It's the last time / And I'm strangely alright". In the adrenaline rush of a breakup just coming on, there can be a clarity of mind, an excitement even. You know that all this, the pain that you cause one another, will cease to be soon enough. It's an ibuprofen for the soul -- temporary relief that helps to dull the sharpness you think you ought to be feeling. And it only lasts a short time, but that's all you need, to get you through that moment.

When my ex and I broke up, our "the last time" was me breaking down, crying, telling him that if he was going to continue to call me names and treat me the way he did, I couldn't put up with it anymore. And he said, "Okay, well we're done then." And five minutes later, I walked into a shift at my job, having collected myself enough to smile for the students I TAed for. I think, probably, that if they had looked into my eyes, the grimness there would've betrayed me, but every mask we wear has its cracks if you know where to look. With him, this time, there was no "holding so close", there was no "in his arms". Maybe, he had already made up his mind by then, maybe there had been a time before then that he knew would be our last together. Maybe this song is for him, not me. It's an uncomfortable thought. But not impossible. I haven't begun again, I haven't dated anyone since then. I haven't wanted to. I didn't feel anywhere near ready for it again for so long. Even now I'm skeptical.

"Dead of Night"

The second set of levels in Sayonara Wild Hearts puts The Fool into the Woe Woe Woods. She begins by chasing down a white stag, getting close enough to hop on its back and ride it, leaping and bounding through the haunting, glittering forest. This is being ready to begin again, the freedom of wide leaps hurtling between trees adorned with jagged, pastel leaves, as tinkling, ethereal music rings out. Then, she encounters the bad belles of these woods, the Howling Moons, a biker gang of girls dressed in wolf masks. Their boss song is called "Dead of Night".

The Fool is now riding a motorbike outfitted with two laser cannons (formed out of, what else, the tarot cards Judgement and Justice), chasing the Howling Moons through the woods like the speeder bike scene out of Return of the Jedi. Sometimes, robotic wolves drop out of the sky to barrel into her. Sometimes, the Howling Moons board their gigantic three-headed wolf mech, who drops bombs and shoots lasers back at The Fool. "What is left when you're not around? / I have nowhere to go / Shake the pain, break away, leave it all behind / With a hint of dawn, I'm already gone". After every breakup, the thing I notice immediately after is all the time that's now empty. Time I used to spend talking to the other person, or doing things with them, or thinking about them. I suppose I still can think about them, but all those moments are just... available. My sophomore year, my roommates distracted me with promises of board games and pizza. I'm always sorry I didn't keep in better touch with them. I'm terrible about keeping up with folks who I don't see day to day -- I've always been much better about interacting with people when we're physically both present. Other breakups, I didn't have roommates to help me distract myself, but I got myself busy other ways. It couldn't change, though, the way I slept. That, I'd distinctly notice the missing person I'd otherwise cuddle with. A feeling in my chest, like something belonged resting against it.

The singer continues into the chorus and the second verse, as The Fool lands a hard punch to the belly of the wolf mech. "You were me, I was you / It's so faded but this much was true". I'm not always the best at conveying how I feel. When I love someone, it manifests in... the way I look at them, the way I talk with them, or move around them. The way I touch them, the way I let them touch me. Which, is frequently not what people are expecting to look for. I don't put it into words very often, which is something I know I should do more. I don't typically make or buy gifts for the other person. Or if I do, it'll be very specific, tied to something small, some intimate moment we shared. Love for me is all about those little moments, sharing a room where we don't need to talk or do anything, just being together in a place we can trust each other with. When I love someone, it's because I feel like I know them, very deeply. I'm not always good at sharing myself, but I hope that I do share enough that those special people can know me too, that we can really understand one another in ways that nobody else can penetrate.

"Mine"

Next up, a floating city of tall buildings and highway overpasses called Twilight Cry Sky, where The Fool quickly meets the Stereo Lovers, identical twins whose only differentiator is that one wears a black mask and the other a white mask. This boss song, called "Mine", is upbeat and bright. It talks about a possessive love, or more properly a fetishization, an appeal to the trophy of what one's partner might ideally be. And again in this song, the ambiguity of the wild hearts emerges. The lyrics contain a brief mention in the chorus to "Your wild heart glitters / And my eyes shine". Upon victory in this fight, Queen Latifah announces your triumph with a sunny "Sayonara, wild heart!" Are the bosses we're fighting the wild hearts? Are they both vile and wild? What is The Fool, then?

The hard part for me in writing this, I think, is really the question, "Why?" Why do I still feel so unsettled about this particular ex? This song, after all, reminds me strongly of someone else who made me uncomfortable, or of things I would sometimes do. "I have laid my eyes on you / A glistening piece of sparkling new / I never learned what I can't own / You'll be mine and mine alone" was never something that came up in this relationship. If anything, it reminds me of what happened after our first breakup (of three), when seeing him dating someone else prompted me to realize the feelings I had for him. I hadn't wanted to interfere, but I ended up doing so anyways, and he broke up with that person to date me again. I'm not proud of breaking them up like that. But I got to have him to myself.

I could wax on and on about how I've been wronged, and all the vile things he did to me. In fact, part of me wants to announce all that he did. I found out recently that I can't even go back to our texts between one another -- at some point in the past 10 months, he used a feature of Telegram to delete them from both of our phones. I want there to be... some record of it, something that I can go back and remind myself: "No, all that actually happened. You're not crazy." But, for example with this deleting the texts, what is even my goal in dredging it up again? I was hurt by it, that it felt like he didn't even let me have the dignity of deciding what to do with all that history. On the other hand though, it's true I never read back over them. I didn't want to, they were painful for me. And... should I be expecting anything of him by this point? The last time we'd actually conversed any before, he'd given me a hollow apology. When I told him I still didn't want to be around him, he quickly pointed out that I should be grateful he did apologize to me, since I had so much more to apologize to him for that he was just letting go. To this day, it's hard for me to pick apart what were my actual shortcomings and what was him just gaslighting me. He gaslit me a lot, and deflected, and acknowledged very little of the things I told him were hurtful to me. I think it's helpful to admit that, and to use those specific words. I don't like the idea that I was manipulated, or that things I thought I was doing to be thoughtful and caring were being used so that he didn't have to accept responsibility for the consequences of his actions. But that happened. It was real.

"The World We Knew"

Following this, The Fool finds herself dropping into the Desert of Doubts, a deep purple desert, eternally at sunset, with wide highways The Fool can drift down in her open-top muscle car. Down the road, sitting alone on a throne in truly the middle of nowhere, she encounters Hermit64, a VR goggle-clad figure with the capability to turn The Fool into a cartridge that she plugs into the headset. Her song, "The World We Knew", is a much slower affair than the previous boss songs. The singer laments the loss of "the world we knew", the inability to start again after all. Unlike "Begin Again" a few boss fights ago, it seems the singer is less dismissive of whatever had preceeded her broken heart. "They say 'begin again' / They say 'begin again' / But I'll take any fragments I could find / The say 'begin again' / They say 'begin again' / But I'll treasure any fragments left behind". Even when one wants to move on, all the little pieces of joy trapped in pieces of memory, flies trapped in one's personal amber, are hard to just throw away.

Whenever anyone asks about this ex, I talk almost exclusively about the negatives. I have plenty of stories, about some of the worst things another person has done to me in my rather charmed, fortunate life. But for one, they make nice stories, and for another no relationship would stand if it were just the murderer's row of Worst Days. I cherish the day that he admitted to me, after a long and arduous argument, that he recognized the toxicity in him sometimes, and just had trouble... dealing with it. That it escaped and slashed at the people close to him too often, but he didn't know how to stop that from happening. The nights when we'd talk at length, even about hard things, and the embarrassing way I'd phrase things. Things that I talked to him about in even the most, honestly, cringeworthy ways, have since developed into really meaningful and important insights about myself.

I even think fondly of the night that he got too drunk, and I held him in my lap, and he cried and told me something awful. And I didn't appreciate at the time enough of the context. That growing up, he had felt lonely, and had ended up falling into a group that maybe, it seems, wasn't the best to be around. And from here, I've had to fill in the gaps on my own -- for one, it's a subject he was extremely sensitive about, but for two, it only dawned on me that this might have been what he was talking about after our last break up. But, maybe they had told him something, convinced him that the way he was feeling meant a specific thing, and that it was okay, natural even, to accept it. But when the time came and he did, deep down, he still knew that there was something amiss. Actions have consequences, and for him, consequences had chased him to drink heavily, wind up in my apartment, and burst into tears when I showed him an otherwise inocuous GIF. In that moment, he opened himself up to me in ways I was not prepared to respond to. I regret that I didn't understand the gravity of it at the time, for sure. But, I can't forget it either. And strangely, even though it's a reminder of the burden he unwittingly put on me to help him keep his secrets, that moment is what I remember most fondly about our relationship. It's something I'm not sure he's even told the other people he's dated. That he would open up to me like that means a great deal to me, despite everything.

"Inside"

The Fool escapes the VR headset after defeating the hermit and flies into the portal to approach the final antagonist waiting in Lovedead City. The city feels to me particularly like Neo Bowser City, a track from Mario Kart 7 and 8. It's a cyberpunk city with highways and low ceilings (that occasionally double as upside-down highways themselves), with round tunnels that you can shoot up the sides of at will, with inexplicable wood bridges and ramps. We meet Little Death early on, a short, giggling blonde woman wielding a huge scythe, the orchestrator of all the stolen harmony in this universe. Her song, "Inside", another bright and pumping song, focuses on the totality of love, its full experience. The singer focuses on a small conversation per verse, the late night rumblings of two lovers in bed, who can't help but keep each other up late into the night talking. "And it's late nights, and it's Game Boys / And it's too bright and it's synth noise / And it's Charli and it's milkshakes / And it's Carly and it's heartbreaks". Love is... so many things, all these little bits and pieces cobbled together into something we sing and write and talk about like we really understand. In the most technical sense, it's a chemical reaction in the brain, probably, something telling you "Hey, it would be good for the upkeep of your species to fuck this person and then raise a child with them," but nobody likes a Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

I wish I was better at making my feelings known. I've hurt plenty of people in the past because of my difficulties expressing what was inside me. It's hard for me to tell someone I love them, and it's hard for me to tell someone that they're hurting me. It's there, and it's important, but it gets caught in my throat. I don't want to be left hanging on a limb, told my feelings don't match theirs. I don't want to trouble them with something too trivial, when my feelings can just be fixed. I don't want to be misunderstood, where they assume more or less than I'm trying to tell them, and enough words can't always dispel those misunderstandings. I always trusted body language far more than words talking to someone. Just like how in soccer, where even when someone does something tricky with their feet, the ball is going to go where their hips are pointing or else they can't follow it, words don't cut to the deep of what's happening. But sometimes words are all we have left. "But the right words / Never come / It all comes out / Silly-dumb / And all the things I need to say / And all the big words seem to stay / On the inside / On the inside".

I question what I want out of writing this, or what I would want out of talking to him again. The easy answer is, I want him to be better. And I see glimpses. What I see, I don't know. Perhaps I read too much into it, but I know him. And what I see feels like a facade. Every so often, it slips, and I see back into him proper again. Inside is... someone who's trying, but the only way he ever learned to try was to fake it. That having an honest goddamn feeling for himself isn't natural, because guys don't cry, guys don't get emotional. So he puts on the mask of cutesy and positive and hopes that nudges him along in the right direction. And maybe it will, over time. I hope it will. It's a weird thing to realize, but it sinks into me now as I write this that I still love him, albeit in a different way than before. It's the way I love my parents. There are things, a lot of things, that I don't discuss with my parents. They're for me, or they're things they never seem to understand, or they're things I'm afraid they will aggressively not understand. When I came out to my parents, the exact quote from my mother was, "We put all our eggs into one basket, and that was our fault." It's burned in, like a plasma TV along the back wall of Walmart with its DVD menu of Over the Hedge. There will always be some distance between us now. But, I still appreciate everything they did for me, everything they went through to raise me. They're not perfect, but that's too much to ask of them, so I love them for all the ways I recognize they try anyways. I don't see the distance between me and my ex ever going back to zero, and it will be a very long time before I could trust him enough again to embroil myself in another romantic relationship with him. But, knowing what I do about him, I still love him. I feel like, you get to know anyone that well, that deeply, and see the way they see themselves? You can't help but to.

The fight with Little Death is the most extensive of the five. She yawns in the middle, tired of your antics. You land three solid punches in a row on her, and unlike before, she doesn't turn into a heart you can smash. She lands on the road in front of you, and, in a way that somehow manages to strike the right tone of goofy and not grotesque, vomits blue blood so profusely that you begin to ride your motorbike on its trail to pursue her for another fatal strike. And when you do finally land the killing blow, she bursts into multiple hearts, some of which manage to escape your shattering spree and fuse back into a huge winged demon form. At the end of the fight, a looming eye is left behind, and the final level, "Wild Hearts Never Die", begins with you pursuing it too.

"Wild Hearts Never Die"

The giant eye sends huge blocks bearing the tarot cards of the five bosses on them and winged bats hurtling towards The Fool. It shoots lasers out of its eye, forcing her to dip and weave between the shots and the blocks and the bats until she can manage to plunge her sword into the eye. This time, the eye bursts for good, leaving behind five tarot cards, the five bosses you fought. Now, The Fool pulls itself back out of the skater girl, and combines with the five tarot cards into a being that, taking the forms of the bosses you previously defeated, chase the skater girl, who rides her skateboard through the previous worlds. And at first, it seems like an ordinary boss rush, completely until the last moment when the skater girl, instead of punching the reeled back boss, kisses them. It was only until Little Death returned that I realized that these weren't the actual bosses, they were The Fool dressed as them (The Fool, after all, is brunette, with a tight bun, unlike the blonde Little Death). After cycling through the bosses, The Fool turns into a dragon that you ride, who turns back into the butterfly from the beginning sequence, and the skater girl rides her skateboard down Rainbow Road once more to her bedroom. There's actually an official music video for this song, which I'd recommend checking out. The important part to me is that it begins with a woman receiving a simple text. "Are you ok?" By the end of the video, her response comes back. "I will be."

I want to be okay. I want it not to be a thing that I inevitably dump out on my friends whenever some new incident occurs. And by now, for the most part I am. I mean, I'm still hurt when I find out about new things my ex has done that impact me. I still don't want to be around him. I avoided even going back onto the university campus he still attends for most of my most recent visit back home, because I didn't want to see him until I really had to. And yet, somehow, when I finally convinced myself it wasn't a big deal, we probably wouldn't encounter one another just wandering around, within thirty seconds of stepping out of my car, there he was. The fates had ordained I was to be punished for my cowardice. But... at this point, I can shrug it off at least. I don't have to collect myself from crying in the airport, or before stepping into my job. The indignities he puts me through, at this point, more feel worthy of exasperation than anything sharper. Of course he would continue to do this. Why would I ever expect anything else.

With swelling vocals, as the skater girl rides the dragon back across the Ocean of Death towards her own world once more, Queen Latifah's penultimate narration roars out, following you and the skater girl home: "FROM THE SHARDS OF YOUR BROKEN HEART, THE REAL HEROINE HAS RISEN. YOU HAVE RESTORED THE LOST HARMONY OF OUR WORLD. NOW YOU MUST GO AND FIND HARMONY IN YOUR OWN. SAYONARA, WILD HEART."

"A Place I Don't Know"

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a audiovisual experience with very few comparisons. As one form of measurement, I cried at the ending, when the first kiss happens. I've listened to the songs on repeat and nearly nothing else for a week now, keeping myself from crying all the while. I cried looking up their lyrics. I cried writing out this whole thing. I, uh, can't guarantee you'll cry too, or that it will spark this specific set of emotions in you. But it's a gorgeous game, with a stellar soundtrack. And, I look forward to a time I can join the heroine, falling "through spirals of sadness and anger, until she could not fall any deeper, and [fall] right back into her groove."

"What's the word, does that thing have a name? / When familiar surroundings just don't look the same / Do you think that it's strange? It's my way I suppose / I'm just longing for a place I don't know"