An Aside About Everything, by Sasha
A surreal experience in which a person (or a god?) journeys to the center (of what?) in search of a woman (who?).
An Aside About Everything is full of strange scenery and inexplicable interactions. It follows a dreamlike logic as you jump from place to place, watching the lines between different characters blur and not fully understanding why things are happening or even what exactly is going on. But there is a sense of grave emotional weight to it all, and while I cannot claim to understand all of the details, I do feel that there is a symbolic meaning behind most of what happens.
On a replay, I unfortunately encountered an infinite loop bug that occurs when trying to “take the plunge.” In order to avoid this, it is necessary to select the second dialogue option, “Besides what?”, when meeting Ciara for the first time.
Somewhat more spoilery musings for the initiated:
The main thrust of the story is that a man is looking for a woman who has been lost to him for a long time. A former lover, perhaps? Along the way, he interacts with several other women. He doesn’t know most of them at first, but they all mysteriously seem to know things about him.
His pronouns, He and Him, always with the first letter capitalized, give the impression that he is a god. But his only special power seems to be forcing the women around him to do what he wants them to do - a power to which some acquiesce and others push back with fear and desperation.
Taking these two things together - the fact that the women seem to know the protagonist, and the fact that he can (partially) control them after becoming acquainted with them - I get the feeling that the women are in some way elements of the protagonist’s psychic landscape, that they exist in his mind. But to call them merely figments of his imagination would be an oversimplification, since they have their own inclinations and sometimes resist what the protagonist demands of them. Maybe they represent aspects of his own psyche that are not entirely under his conscious control.
But I feel like they have a link to the external world, as well, because of their significance in the search for the missing woman, who feels very much like an Other, an outside force with whom the protagonist is desperate to reconnect. I definitely believe that the missing woman is (or was) an actual person, existing independently of the protagonist. Maybe the same is true of the present women, maybe they are his mental schema of actual people or the archetypes by which he views actual people. Maybe they are all his mental schema of certain aspects of the missing woman. I couldn’t say for sure.
But the important thing is that finally meeting the missing woman is dependent on the protagonist relinquishing his control over the other women. Doing this, he is able to meet the missing woman one final time, and she basically tells him to let her go, that they ought not to be together.
I think this final scene makes the crux of the story clear. Well, clear relative to the rest of it. What our protagonist is really seeing is his memory of the missing woman, and he is able to see her clearly only because he relinquished his control - he became able to approach the memory of who she was rather than grasping after who he wanted her to be. And he dies what I think is probably a symbolic death, since his identity is fundamentally altered by the realization that she, the subject of this whole aside, can no longer be his everything.
That, at least, is my best attempt to interpret this work. I enjoyed it immensely.