Explosion at the Diary Factory

I want to tell you a story about the summer of 2017. It’s the first week of June. Various pop culture events were occurring, which I will refrain from recapping for the sake of avoiding cliche. I was 22, going on 23, and I was lost, lost, lost. I graduated from college a year prior, in a hot ceremony on the quad where our commencement speaker got the name of the school wrong. I’d gotten a BA in Film Studies, which is the kind of thing you either do because you intend on moving to Los Angeles to become a director or because you assume you’re going to kill yourself at some point so you might as well spend four years doing what makes you happy. It was the latter, in my case, though it failed to come to pass. I moved back in with my parents and holed up in my childhood bedroom. I felt as though by finishing college I had failed where dying would have meant success. I didn’t look for a job. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I lived, and had lived for as long as I could remember, in a presentist morass—the future wasn’t going to happen for me, and the less time spent dwelling on the past the better. The subtext of every moment was that, eventually, without question, this was all just going to end. Why make plans?

All of my diary entries from around this time are variations on a theme: I know what I would like my life to look like, and I know the things I would need to do to make it that way, and yet…. I lived in a constant state of paralysis. “I need someone to give me that push,” I wrote in May of that year. “I can’t do it on my own. I can’t start anything on my own.” Doing things is something people do. I was something other, the ghost that continued to live, perpetually pre-deceased. I don’t remember 2017 very well. Much of it is preserved for me in a series of haunting photographs which still live in my camera roll. Here’s one of the most distressing:

Sends a chill up my spine to this day.

Point being, I was not in the process of getting my life together, and I did not expect that I ever would. The most I was doing with my life in 2017 was odd neighborhood jobs in my hometown, offered to me by sympathetic friends of my parents. One of the strangest was as the assistant of an elderly landscaper who himself was a longtime odd-jobber. By “assistant” I of course mean that I would do all the work under his loose supervision. But he did pay me cold hard cash under the table, so I can’t be too hard on him. For a couple weeks he would drive me every morning to a town about 90 minutes away so that we could clean the outside walls of a small chapel in a cemetery. I tried to find it on Google Maps recently, but the camera car has never driven down the road it stands alongside. This was the kind of cemetery that had been around for centuries, where gravestones were shoved at odd angles so close together that it raised uncomfortable questions about the position of the bodies beneath. There was no phone service out there. It would come back slowly as we drove away in the afternoon, the world filtering back to me bit by bit. On one of these drives back my boss talked to me about women. “Can’t live with ‘em,” a pregnant pause, “can’t kill ‘em!” He died a couple weeks later, without paying me for the work. So closes another door, I remember thinking, and not too many signs of open windows.

All this being necessary for you to understand what life was like for me when I started Persona 5 that first week of June 2017. I loved Persona 5, unreservedly, unironically, full-chestedly. I spent more time playing it that summer than I did talking to any other human beings, including the parents and sisters with whom I was sharing a home. I played it all the way through, and then I played it again.