Yearn

(This is, I think, the conclusion to my personal reckoning with Dark Souls II, which started almost a year ago. You can find all my earlier posts about the game here.)

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There is a spell in Dark Souls II called Yearn. The in-game description for Yearn reads, in part, “People regret loss, and yearn for what they do not have.“ And boy, they sure do.

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The curse in Dark Souls II is a soul sickness. For me, it makes sense to understand it as loneliness and lovelessness. But I think one of the strengths of Dark Souls II is that it’s so easy to interpret its struggle in your own way. Perhaps to you the curse means something different. For a younger me, it would have symbolized gender dysphoria. But I do believe that loneliness and lovelessness are the great soul sicknesses of the modern era.

There’s a character in Dark Souls II named Lucatiel. I felt a connection to her from the first time I encountered her last year. As I met her again and again, and her words gave voice to my feelings and my fears, she became, for me, the soul of Dark Souls II. 

She starts off wanting to push you away. She has learned to live with isolation. Connection with others does not come so easily to her.

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And I understand this, because I am wary of people, too, and perhaps too comfortable in isolation. But if you talk to her some more, you can break through her defenses a bit.

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This meeting felt so hopeful to me, a little light in the darkness of my journey. When we met again, she told me more about herself, then seemed to feel bad for doing so…

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and I wanted to say, Don’t feel bad, this is exactly what we need. Connection. Closeness. Truth. This is the way toward breaking the curse. But I couldn’t say that.


Things do not go well for Lucatiel, and the curse begins to take its toll on her. Loneliness can break your heart, but it can do things to your mind, too.

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She is losing herself. And why? Because she cannot connect with another, or thinks she can’t. 

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(from The Lunchbox)

Later still…

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I do too. It’s a problem. Sometimes it’s all I can think about, my self, the things that are missing from my life. It colors how I see everything. I get trapped in it. 

And I want to say to her that I want to exist, too, more than anything, but that she’s got it all wrong, and that the way out of one’s obsession with the self and into real existence isn’t through destroying others but, again, through connecting with them and becoming something more together than we are capable of being on our own. Like me, she’s stuck within…

There are so many things
that I don’t understand.
There’s a world within me
that I cannot explain.
Many rooms to explore
but the doors look the same.
I am lost, I can’t even remember my name.

I’ve been for sometime
Looking for someone
I need to know now
Please tell me who I am.

…and she needs to get beyond. 

There’s no such thing as competition
To find our way we lose control
Remember love’s our only mission
This is a journey of the soul

I want to reach out and touch her. I feel like this might help break the curse for us both. But again, I can’t. And the next time I see her is the last.

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For me, time with friends is lifesaving. Those moments of connection that get me out of my own head and focused on what another person is thinking and feeling and living, or that let me share what’s happening in my head and heart with others and find those ways in which I’m not so alone in being alone. Lucatiel helped me better understand my own struggle. I wish I could have done more for her. 

Wandering the landscapes of Dark Souls II feels like wandering the landscapes within myself. It feels like my private universe.

No time, no place to talk about the weather
The promise of love is hard to ignore
You said the chance wasn’t getting any better
A labor of love is ours to endure

I will run for shelter, endless summer lift the curse
It feels like nothing matters in our private universe

I have all I want, is that simple enough?
There’s a whole lot more I’m thinking of

And it’s a pleasure that I have known
And it’s a treasure that I have gained
And it’s a pleasure that I have known

I feel that after a while, if nobody else wanders the places inside of us, if our universes stay private for too long, they can start to feel withered, isolated, Majula-like. 

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I hope someday to find a soul connection with someone, to wander the intimate landscapes of someone else and have them wander mine. In All About Love, bell hooks quotes John Welwood:

A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other’s individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on a deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension–seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence.

Hooks goes on to say:

Throughout our lives we meet lots of people with whom we feel that special click that could take us on the path of love. But this click is not the same as a soul connection. Often, a deeper bonding with another person, a soul connection, happens whether we will it to be so or not.

Referring to couples she talked with, she writes:

In all cases where individuals felt that they had known true love, everyone testified that the bonding was not easy or simple. To many folks this seems confusing precisely because our fantasy of true love is that it will be just that–simple and easy. Usually we imagine that true love will be intensely pleasurable and romantic, full of love and light. In truth, true love is all about work.

And I keep thinking that whoever comes along–the female knight, the kind of woman I want to be with and the kind of woman I want to be, someone willing to fight for the ideas and the people she loves–will have her work cut out for her. 

She’ll have monsters to slay.

She’ll have curses to break.

The struggle for me in the meantime–and it is a conscious, daily struggle sometimes–is to walk the path of forgiveness, staying open to the possibility of love, staying hopeful, not closing off and meeting the world with bitterness or giving in to despair. 

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In All About Love, hooks quotes Robin Casarjian on forgiveness:

Forgiveness is a way of life that gradually transforms us from being helpless victims of our circumstances to being powerful and loving ‘co-creators’ of our reality…. It is the fading away of the perceptions that cloud our ability to love.

 And I know that sometimes I am going down the path to becoming hollow. I lose hope, I become bitter and unforgiving toward the world, and my ability to see beyond myself gets clouded, and with it, of course, my ability to love. How do we restore our humanity?

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For me I guess it’s being mindful of the blessings in my life. It’s coffee and conversations with friends. It’s art that breaks my heart again and again and in doing so, keeps it from freezing over. 

At a certain point late in my transition, I realized that the whole point of transition was, of course, to get beyond myself and form more authentic connections with others. Because romantic love seemed more readily available to me before I transitioned, I have at times worried that I traded one curse for another. But what good was that love, when I was being torn apart inside and knew that even if the love we felt for each other was itself real, it wasn’t rooted in the reality of who I was?

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I finished Dark Souls II’s main quest. The queen has been overthrown.

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I had a way then
Losing it all on my own
I had a heart then
But the queen has been overthrown
And I’m not sleeping now
The dark is too hard to beat
And I’m not keeping up
The strength I need to push me
You show the lights that stop me turn to stone
You shine it when I’m alone
And so I tell myself that I’ll be strong
And dreaming when they’re gone 

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There are more places to visit and battles to fight but I don’t think there’s more meaning to be squeezed out of Dark Souls II for me. If the curse gives you something to want, something to fight for, if it encourages you to look past yourself and try to connect with others, then maybe it is not such a bad thing, as long as you can keep hope alive, and keep your heart open to the possibility that somewhere out there is a connection that can break the curse.

We’ve got to keep the fires burning.

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