Page 69 of Level Up
In the early levels of the game, the cloud is graceful and fluffy and makes everything bloom beneath it, brings out the best in everyone. It always reminds me of Victory, who brightens a room just by walking in, who makes the world more beautiful with her paintings and murals—who helped me to bloom and thrive after high school desiccated me.
But the cloud in level thirteen is like me. Trying to be good, trying to do the right thing, yet so often getting it wrong. It doesn’t belong here anymore. It’s defective. Broken. The cloud has lost its identity, as the toxicity of the world has infected it over and over.
Only by joining with other clouds can it heal itself—they heal each other. And eventually there are enough healthy clouds to bring life back to the ground below. This is the part that always gets me in the feels.
I don’t know how to find other clouds in real life. I don’t know how to heal myself or anyone else. If anything, when I find a fluffy cloud like Victory or Damien, I just latch on, feeding off their goodness while providing nothing in return.
Sooner or later, all the clouds will realize I’m a dead weight and drop me.
I’m not as chatty as usual in tonight’s stream, but I think it suits the vibe of this level. The chat is slow, too, even though Ican see that a lot of people are watching—alot. Way more than my streams get most days.
I manage to hold it together, though, and I don’t actually cry on camera, but as I’m wrapping things up, I see a familiar username in the chat again.
SconesOfAyor:You’re online.
To anyone else, it would just seem like a stupidly obvious observation, and if they were familiar with his dry sense of humour, it might even seem like the sort of thing he would say just to be weird. But to me, it reads a bit differently.
Maybe he thinks I’ve read his messages and ignored him—which is not quite true, since I didn’t actually read any of them. Or maybe he assumes I’ve been busy, and this is the first chance I’ve had to be online. In any case, I get his meaning: he wants to chat before I run away again.
I’m feeling emotionally raw after the game, but also too tired to keep running. As soon as I end the stream, I open our chat window to read everything he’s sent in the past forty-eight hours.
SconesOfAyor:
Hey
Are you okay?
Are we okay?
SconesOfAyor:
Right, you’re probably having dinner with your family
I forgot. Again.
Call me when you get this, I guess
I mean, yes, please do that
There’s no “I guess”
SconesOfAyor:
So I don’t know if you’re pretending to be offline again or if you are just busy doing other things, which is fair, but if you’re there could we please talk?
If you’re not there, I hope you are enjoying whatever it is you’re doing
SconesOfAyor:
Wow, it’s been over 24 hours since you played SOA4
Are you okay???
SconesOfAyor:
I’m hoping you’re not dead and you’re just mad at me or something
In which case I hope I can apologize and make things right
