lost in the forest (an Epanalepsis post)
The other night I started playing The Witcher III. I spent some time walking in its forests.

And I thought, these might be the most convincing forests I’ve ever walked in in a game. The wind rustling the trees. The sounds of animals. The beams of light piercing through the branches.
I knew exactly what I was doing there. There is no confusion or getting lost. There is no mystery about what the real purpose or value or meaning of a thing is. The Witcher III is a pre-discovered world.
The next day, I found myself in an entirely different video game forest.

This is where Epanalepsis starts. It is a dream. It felt as unreal as The Witcher III’s forest felt real. I felt entirely lost. I had no idea what I was doing there. I walked and walked and I found a person and a thing and I had no idea what they meant.
It made sense to me that this character, Rachel, would have such dreams. She is lost, too, in her life. Lost in ways that I understand very well right now.




Epanalepsis reminds me a great deal of David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks. Both move forward through time in leaps, both focus on multiple characters who are in some way connected, and both involve some sort of struggle happening underneath the fabric of what we perceive as the real world. Also, both are concerned with love and connection. But The Bone Clocks is a conventionally structured novel. It wants to be understood. It wants the narrative arcs and thematic thrusts of its tale to be easily discernible. Playing Epanalepsis felt like the equivalent of reading just two or three pages from each section of The Bone Clocks and trying to make some sense of it. It left me with the feeling that I was missing something.
I played through Epanalepsis twice and I got two different endings for Rachel. Both were pretty unfulfilling, as things should sometimes be. Sometimes people wait for something that never comes. Sometimes people spend their whole lives looking for something and never find it.
But it nags at me, the feeling Epanalepsis as a whole and Rachel’s story in particular left me with. Her life intersects with something underneath, something beyond, something more. And then it slips away. Isn’t more possible for her? For me? I really feel like I’m missing something here. But that’s okay. I feel that way about life, too.
Notes
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