Post
by shiro_midori » Tue Apr 10, 2012 11:20 pm
Heh, it'll be hard to put it all down in a readable manner.
Well, I suppose I could start when I first played KS, even though my problems go way, way back.
My first eroge, and only my second visual novel, if you count 999 as one. Emi's path was my first, and came naturally to me. At first, I viewed it as sort of a cross between an anime and novel with a choose-your-own adventure twist, but that didn't last long. I found myself identifying more and more with the characters, especially Hisao. I don't have a serious heart condition, but I do have a condition that I have to pay attention to just as much as his. More on this later.
The scene that really made me realize how emotionally invested I was turned out to be "Guess Who's Coming... Never Mind". I chose to confront Emi, and you all know how that goes. The track, "Cold Iron", really hit me hard, and I can't play it without thinking of her face then.
I finished Emi's path on a Monday. The next day, a Tuesday, while I was taking the bus home from college, I decided out of the spur of the moment to run the track near my house. It's always deserted, but well-kept, on weekdays. I placed my backpack and jacket down in a safe place, did some light stretching, and started walking. It evolved into a run after about five steps.
It was a wonderful feeling. Amazing. The asphalt seemed softer than I expected it to. It felt effortless. Perfect. For the first time in a very long time, I felt completely in control. Of myself, of my emotions, of my world. For about ten seconds
I didn't even have a chance to break a sweat. I didn't make it even fifty feet. As I put my left foot down, I must have hit the ground at the wrong angle. Maybe ten, fiteen degrees to the left.
How do I explain the feeling? When the patella is pushed outside the joint, how does it feel? I've described it as being like having your leg torn or blown off, but there's something more to it than that. Dislocation is such a sterile word. The pain doesn't come first. The shock hits immediately. As if a hand reaches up from the ground to pull you to hell.
I fell, of course. I must have fallen on it, looking back. I can't remember anything but the intense pain and the need to get the leg straight. The time it was out was probably less than three second, but it always feels like an eternity. Once the kneecap repositioned itself back in, the pain started to fade away. I knew from experience that it would swell up and start throbbing very soon. Getting up very carefully, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed home, knowing I couldn't walk all the way back. It was about two steps this time before it happened again.
I fell into the grass, the phone in my hand flying out of my hand. This time I was able to fall in such a way that the patella relocated almost immediately after hitting the ground. I laid on the ground, eyes shut, for a moment, before remembering I was in the middle of making a call. After groping around in the grass for a few seconds, I found my cell phone and brought it up to my head. It had gone to the answering machine, so I hung up and called my mother, telling her it was an emergency and where I was.
I laid face-up in the grass. It was a beautiful day, perfect for running. A few small clouds in the sky, a soft breeze whistling through the trees. Not too hot, not too chilly. I noticed all this as I stared up into the sky. It didn't make me feeling any better.
I felt like I had been knocked back down after struggling to bring myself up again. As if some higher power saw my wish to feel good, even "normal", as out of line, hubris. I felt broken.
Now, a week later, it hasn't gotten much better. I finished all the paths, 99% completion with only two scenes left (ironically, in Emi's path). During the week, I kept my knee in a brace, being careful to not put any weight on it when bent, as I found that leads to another dislocation. It settled wrong, swelled up, and the entire joint is stiff, feeling like cold rubber. We have no insurance, not enough money to justify a hospital visit for anything that isn't fatal. It's gone out about five times in one week.
But for the history. I have a condition where the trochlear groove on which the patella rests is much flatter than it should be, allowing dislocations and subluxations to occur much more frequently. Even with this condition, though, I had only experienced four, perhaps five dislocations in my entire life, usually months apart. Now it happens almost every other day, for apparently no reason, even through a full knee brace. Remember when I said I had a condition that I always had to keep in the back of my mind, like Hisao's arrhythmia? That was it. Whenever I'm sitting down, standing up, laying down, whenever I'm doing anything at all, my left knee is always there in the back of my mind. Every motion is made with my condition in mind. I went through six weeks of physical therapy, strengthening the joint muscles, but it proved unsuccessful, with a dislocation happening during the last week when my outstretched leg was tripped over.
Also, I have MDD, Major Depressive Disorder, for which I see a psychiatrist and therapist for regularly, as well as take medication for. An event like this obviously hits me much harder than it normally would. I had been improving, taking control of my life, even making progress learning Japanese (I'm planning on teaching English in Japan through a government-sponsored exchange program). This really felt like being kicked down, losing all the progress I had made. I burrowed deeper into KS, making it the defining aspect of my life this past week. Every time I completed a path, I felt a sense of overwhelming emptiness, as if someone I was close to had just died. I've always been a very empathetic person, which often is to my disadvantage (you can't spell "empathetic" without "pathetic"). So I immediately started on a new path after finishing one.
Now here I sit at 99% completion, two missing scenes, and a wrapped swollen knee. I found two other eroges, Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night, but they can't possibly hold a candle to KS, at least so far. The artwork, the dialogue, the shattering of misconceptions and stereotypes. For the past week, I have lived and breathed Katawa Shoujo. Rin's arc, the one I finished last, prompted me to try to express my infatuation through creative means, and so I spent the entirety of Monday sketching and inking drawings, studying KS track transcriptions, and writing poetry. I even spent half an hour in the college art gallery, studying each painting intently, searching for meaning in the watercolors and pastels.
Where the next day will lead, I have no clue. A wise man once said, "Sufficient for each day is its own badness." Am I really broken? Maybe. But one thing KS has shown me is that it's not the end. It's not what I am that defines me, but who.
As I already said in a different thread: I think I should try to talk to people in words they can understand, in ways they are willing to listen to. To know how to speak to someone you have to listen to what they have to say. Talk about their interests, and what you have in common with them. 
