<Prologue>
December, 2017; I tell a boy with low self-esteem that I love him “unconditionally” and now I have to prove it. He’s been dreaming of getting a new gaming console to escape the bleakness of life, but it’s precisely the bleakness of life that prevents him from buying his own system. He doesn’t have a father to speak of and his mother, a doctor, believes her son is the family’s shameful addiction gene come to life. His sister isn’t much help, either—too busy being the family’s only hope. I’m an early-twenties grad student whose parents are still paying for my apartment, so I pick up extra shifts at the gentrified Mexican restaurant where I work, calculating the number of weeknights I’ll need to put in to net a little over $400 in cash.
He tells me he wants a Nintendo Switch so that’s what I get. I present it to him a little before midnight on Christmas, along with the game he said he wanted for it. I record his reaction to opening the gift because I know deep down it will be priceless. I love you, I say over and over, hoping this time he will really feel it. But when I watch the video back later there is no light in his eyes—only tears as he repeats, I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve any of this.
The moment is almost somber and I can’t figure out why. Desperate to rescue the evening on the occasion of our first big holiday together, I ditch the phone and nudge him to open a smaller box next. Don’t be ridiculous, I say.
The smaller box contains a game with a black front and a silver, dragon-shaped logo. What’s so special about this Skyrim game anyways? I ask.
You’ll see, he answers, wiping his face and rising to switch on the television and connect the console. Within minutes he’s tossing me a Joy-Con.
Blackness.
Then, the sound of a wooden cart being hauled over cobblestone by some hoofed quadrupeds off-screen. A horn trills slowly into an atmospheric crescendo as a hazy vignette of a frostbitten forest comes clearer and sharper into view, just in time for the Nordic-featured man sitting across from you to notice. His gaze whips in your direction.
Hey, you. You’re finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us—and that thief over there. He jerks his chin over his right shoulder.
So it seems that the two of you aren’t the only stowaways on board. A second man, dressed in rags, sits in wide-eyed shock.
Damn you, Stormcloaks, the so-called thief spits petulantly. Skyrim was fine until you came along. The Empire was nice and lazy. If they hadn’t been looking for you, I could’ve stolen that horse and been halfway to Hammerfell…
You quickly decide that whatever these men are talking about is none of your concern—it’s a tide that started and ends above your head, still foggy from beginning in the middle of things. [Still, this feeling is not entirely foreign to you: this is how your real-life relationship with the boy seated beside you first began. You, in the middle of not knowing how to love yourself and him in the middle of not knowing how to love someone else. The blanket of disorientation is a comfort that demands so little of you.]
You there, the thief interjects, looking sharply at you. We shouldn’t be here. It’s the Stormcloaks the Empire wants.
Before you can think to agree, the man who first spoke to you when you awakened cuts in: We’re all brothers and sisters in binds now, thief. And in this it seems he is right: you are all helpless passengers on a brutal road toward the unknown. The thief sputters the name of every god, demon, and entity in between for protection as the stone arch of your final destination finally comes into view.
When your cart finally comes to a grinding halt you stand and follow the others out of it and wait for your name to be called, but not before the so-called Stormcloak lapses into the kinds of sweet, nostalgic musings no darkness can touch.
Face your death with some courage, thief. That’s what he says next when your other companion begins blabbering on about a mistake.
Two other prisoners walk obediently to the chopping block when they’re called, but the thief still hasn’t gotten the memo.
No! I’m not a rebel—you can’t do this! He screams, before bolting in the wrong direction.
Resisting the plot is futile—don’t you understand? When you’re an NPC, you don’t get to choose who you want to be; you want to tell him this, but you can’t because it’s too late. A nearby archer’s arrow sinks him to the ground, and a brief moment of silence punctuates his collapse. Like the ache of an arrow in your own chest, you feel the hot sting of an all-too familiar disappointment. [In the classroom, you are a number whose ability to perform tasks is rewarded by yet another number: a grade. On the floor, you are a faceless character in a uniform greeting an endless spawn of customers with one of a fixed number of dialogue options. You read books. You wipe tables. You write. You run other people’s plates. You are five years into studying a discipline that offers no guarantee of a successful career. You are an only child, your family’s only hope. You sweep, mop, wrap silverware. You pray you’ll learn you were destined for something greater, or else what has this all been for? You stand in front of your reflection in any too-small bathroom and wonder where the light in your eyes has gone.]
Wait—you there, an Imperial guard addresses you, averting your attention from the now-fallen casualty. Who…are you?
<Character Selection>
In the world where I’m a student by day and a server by night, a list of spoon-fed objectives keeps me from second-guessing how I present to others. Still, something in my subconscious yearns for a place where I am allowed to be both/and after twenty-two years of having to choose between either/or. None of my coworkers read literary books, and none of my city-bred socialite classmates have had to sacrifice their autonomy for tips a day in their life.
Before this, I drowned and called it swimming—by which I mean I endured years of dungeon-crawling through white institutions as a brown girl with straightened hair and no heritage, equipped only with the blunt weapon of shame and a looted backstory. The quest: assimilate. The objective: survive. I make a habit of code-switching to better integrate myself into these disparate environments, but deep down I understand I don’t fit in anywhere, that I am doomed to traverse an open-world landscape without a walkthrough to guide me. I’m queer but I don’t know it yet—it’s a plot twist that barrels me sideways in my late twenties after fighting to surface for years. I’m also neurodiverse, but this diagnosis, too, is countless playthroughs away.
Without these core character traits unlocked, I construct a build that is an intellectual every-girl hybrid: part academic overachiever, part tortured artist, part social misfit. I harbor fantasies of a world expansive enough to hold my multitudes, and of a faithful companion who will promise to shoulder the weight of them all with me. But in the liminal space of this dissonance, I gravitate toward the only thing I know that makes me feel alive. It is all I can do to keep hurtling toward the rough embrace of broken boys built like glass cannons—all sweet words, fragile egos, a vicious streak of contempt for their own existence, and a hunger to swallow the world.
In-game, you begin to scroll through the list of “Race” options presented to you on the character customization screen, hoping something will jump out at you enough that you’ll be enticed into forgetting about all the problems of your own race in the real world. You pause halfway down the list, eyes boring into a face that is unmistakably feline:
Khajiit >
Hailing from the province of Elsewyr, they are intelligent, quick, and agile. They make excellent thieves due to their natural stealthiness. All Khajiit can see in the dark at will and have unarmed claw attacks.
Your pulse quickens slightly. You have always had an affinity for cats: arguably the world’s most misunderstood companions. Still, there are those who empathize with their strange otherworldliness, their penchant for trouble, and their absolute inability to heed their own intellect when curiosity is the competing player—yourself included. [You also note with appreciation that the land the Khajiit hail from is a play on the word “Elsewhere,” and as the daughter of a second generation Puerto Rican woman and a Black man who was raised without a father, this, too, sings in your bones.]
January (Morning Star), 2017; how does one live in a world where there is nothing and no one to fight for? I keep this question close to my chest as the familiar fever of obsession blooms in me: only weeks into my new job, I find myself routinely captivated by the aloof, black stare of a stiff-shouldered coworker who stands apart from the rest both literally and figuratively.
In the real world, the rules are simple. Go to school. Get Straight A’s. Go to work. Earn a living. Make friends later. Career first. No breaks. Rest later. No life. Live later. Save money. Fall in love later. Pursue your dreams, but make sure they are achievable—and lucrative. Believe in yourself, but be realistic. Pursue your art, but avoid coloring outside the lines. If you want to thrive in these fast-paced environments, avoid mentioning color altogether. Save yourself. Break later.
But in this world that is at times too real, I am starved for love and affection. I am newly separated from my partner of three years: a narcissist, a scoundrel, a swindler—a thief. At our breaking point, he finally agrees to vacate our shared apartment, but not before the damage is done. My self-esteem robbed, my trust shattered, my body’s inventory excavated on a table at nineteen to remove the growing consequence of his heedless instinct to ravage anything within reach.
I am nothing if not a girl who is smart enough to know trouble when she sees it, perpetually doomed to ignore her own intellect when hunger is the competing player.
The guard who asked for your name looks you up and down. You in one of the trade caravans, Khajiit? Your kind always seems to find trouble. [At this immediately cutting remark, it dawns on you that “Race” is a consequential construct in this world too.]
A prisoner from your group walks forward when called, and is shoved onto his knees with another guard’s boot on his back. As the hooded executioner lunges forward with his ax, the severed head totters into a crate barely big enough to hold it. It might have better suited a head of cabbage, you think. But there is little time to spare for thought. Moments later, the Imperial Captain calls out with a finger thrust in your direction, Next: the cat!
An ominous trill sounds somewhere in the distance, eliciting audible surprise from some in your group. But your executioners remain undeterred.
To the block, prisoner. Nice and easy.
You walk to the block and kneel as instructed, laying your face upon the same stone where the prisoner before you took his last breath. But fate takes pity on you just this once: an ominous silhouette looms over you, and the sound of a vengeful, bellowing call rings out like thunder after a warning flash of lightning. A dragon circles above you, wheeling around before perching on the edge of the tower squarely in your view—close enough that the ground beneath you shakes and sends up a cloud of debris that temporarily fogs your vision. As the monster opens his maw and delivers a series of bone-piercing shouts, you can practically see the air around him curdling into turbulent ripples. Your vision fogs once again, this time in sheer shock of the damage he’s caused. This is your window.
For the first time since opening your eyes in this cutthroat world, the game affords you the freedom to get up and move, so you do. It occurs to you then that from this moment on, this story is your own [has this game, once intended to be a gift for the boy you claimed to love unconditionally, become your own?]—so you dive for the cover of the nearest structure and grab for the blunt weapon at your feet.
<Quest Started: BEFORE THE STORM>
February (Sun’s Dawn), 2017; after weeks of character study, I learn the boy with the liquid black stare bears the name of an angel, and that he’s entrenched in a six-year relationship with a girl he doesn’t love—something I figure by the way he speaks through gritted teeth each time a coworker inquires about his offscreen existence. He seems to aspire to live invisibly, allowing a relationship that should have ended in high school to cling to his ankles because his armor of choice is a cloak of insecurity, and nothing else in his universe has offered him any proof of his existence.
I am nothing if not a girl given to hubristic daydreams; before long, I begin to imagine the feeling that would coarse through me if I could be the one to finally discover him—to pry his safety blanket from his big, strong arms and unlock the treasures he’s kept so closely to his chest, bypassing the boundaries this stage has set for us both as two incurably lonely players without direction.
<Quest Started: DRAGON RISING>
If you want to survive, you’ll have to learn quick. Siding with the man in blue from the beginning of your journey forced you to pick a side in a civil war you didn’t know was raging. To escape Helgen—the place that was to be the end of your story, but which was, in fact, only the beginning—you join him in killing a number of red-garbed Imperial soldiers: the very same force responsible for your capture. It turns out their sole mission is to suppress the resistance (the Stormcloaks) in Skyrim, and they’ll indiscriminately kill any dissident to do it. Then, on your route to Riverwood, you are attacked by a pack of wolves and confronted by a thief who demands all of what little you possess in exchange for your life. Think fast. Act faster.
As you navigate the continent of Tamriel on foot, crossing streams, scaling mountains, picking through dense forests and noting the location of every cave, shrine, and enemy fort you pass, you collect the names of its provinces like wildflowers: Black Marsh. Cyrodiil. Elsweyr. Hammerfell. High Rock. Morrowind. Summerset Isles. Valenwood. Skyrim. For this last, the place where your story unfolds, you commit to memory its nine holds, each containing their own plethora of hidden adventures: Dawnstar. Falkreath. Markarth. Morthal. Riften. Solitude. Whiterun. Winterhold. Windhelm. [It is almost enough to allow you to forget the litany of names that still haunts you at night, carving up a place deeper than your gut with regret and interminable ache: Lucas. Niko. Ethan. Jesse. Robin. Marc. Jake. John. Malcolm. Ben. Yitzi. James. Jack. Jayson. Steven. Tyler—who in the world can you trust?]
<Quest Started: A BLADE IN THE DARK>
March (First Seed), 2017; at the first hint of an opening with the aloof coworker I’ve set my sights on, I suggest driving him home even though his house is in the opposite direction of mine. It is during one of these late-night trips which soon become routine that he admits to feeling stuck in his relationship. Cowardice isn’t kindness, I say.
More surprising than my uncharacteristic boldness is the way he receives it: You were right, he privately confesses one Saturday morning at work weeks later. I’m going to do it, I’m going to break up with her.
And before I can utter a word of protest (have things already escalated so quickly?), can think to reload an old save, replay the conversation and consider a different dialogue option, he heads through the side exit of the restaurant and summons his girlfriend to the outdoor water fountain equidistant from our job and hers at the nearby Victoria’s Secret store. He breaks up with her then and there during his lunch break, then returns to work in time to resume his shift as if nothing at all had just happened.
I am nothing if not a girl governed by relentless impulse—a dark mind, a quick tongue, and a lonely curiosity that knows no bounds. Think fast. Speak faster.
<Quest Started: A CORNERED RAT>
Your first real ally is a Riverwood woman who masquerades as an innkeeper by day. By night, she operates as one of the last surviving members of the Blades, an ancient order of dragon hunters once employed to defend the emperors of Tamriel. When the dragons returned with a vengeance after the Great War, the defenders’ numbers dwindled, and it was all the survivors could do to scatter across the continent and await the one who legends claimed would liberate Skyrim from their tyranny: the one capable of killing a dragon permanently by devouring its soul.
The Greybeards seem to think you’re the Dragonborn, she says with the haggardness of waiting too long and nearly giving up hope thick on her tongue. I hope they’re right.
But before she will agree to join forces with you, you’ll need to prove you are who the prophecies claim you to be. So you follow her to Kynesgrove, home of the nearest dragon burial mound, with a bow slung across your back. [You are nothing if not a girl seduced by insurmountable odds, a girl so consumed by self-doubt that you believe the cure will come from proving yourself worthy to a non-believer.]
When the second dragon appears, you do what your story demands of you: you face down the thing you’ve been taught to fear most.
April (Rain’s Hand), 2017; never mind the fact that my obsessive fixation, which started it all, did not have a single target. Like a spray of arrows, my damage radiated outward, my confusion and powerlessness and conflicting desires the problem of everyone in my orbit. All in a matter of weeks, I seduced a boy who was taken, led on a different boy who repulsed me, and made out with my best friend in the passenger seat of my car after too many drinks in Long Island City. Her lips were softer than a boy’s all-too-familiar litany of lies—I wondered if I could ever truly get used to them. Days later, she fingered me on the floor of my apartment while I stared blankly at the ceiling. She would try again in the dark of my living room during a girls’ movie night, surrounded by half-drunk wine glasses and all of our closest friends.
But when faced with the ultimatum of choosing any one person at all, it is all I can do to surrender to my own helplessness, noncommittally seeing each storyline through to its forced ending.
I am nothing if not a girl who desperately, hopelessly yearns to be chosen, even more than I have ever wanted to choose anything for myself.
<Quest Started: ALDUIN’S BANE>
Spontaneous dragon sightings become routine as water in the month of Rain’s Hand, and after weeks of tracing every labyrinthian lead back to its source, you (with the help of Delphine and a few others) finally identify the one culprit behind it all: a dragon revered as the World Eater, cursed with insatiable bloodlust. He was defeated once, long ago, but not forever: and now, upon his return, he has vowed to bring ruin to the world after gorging on the very souls of the fallen heroes who died trying to end his tyranny.
If only realizing your boss was the entire battle, you think.
“And the Scrolls have foretold, of black wings in the cold, That when brothers wage war come unfurled! Alduin, Bane of Kings, ancient shadow unbound, With a hunger to swallow the world!”—Song of the Dragonborn
Once, I spoke casually, and flirted carelessly. I did not believe in consequences—only in the idea that if I was hungry enough, I would be fed, and if I was starved enough, I could be wholly devoured—
June (Mid Year), 2017; under my tutelage, my formerly-estranged-coworker-turned-boyfriend learns to become more confident in himself. He quits his drinking habit, and his musculature softens into something more deliberate, balanced, and refined. He gets a new pair of glasses with sleek black frames that command attention rather than begging to be forgotten, and he learns to dress well in the clothes and shoes I pick for him. He also learns how to season his chicken the way I do, and how to make love to me, and how to beg for things the boys he went to school with would have called him a string of senseless, homophobic obscenities for.
Once, I believed I had bestowed upon my boyfriend a blessing whose charm radiated outward like an impenetrable bubble, the man within remade from nothing but the material of my adoration. I believed I could remake him solely in the image of the character traits I loved; that with strength and conviction alone I could bend our fates into something intertwined. I believed it was my strong hands he was holding onto while I was teaching him all the while how to hold himself.
<Quest Started: THE FALLEN>
It was no easy feat to arrive at the moment when you could stand face to face with the World Eater. You’ve infiltrated Thalmor-ridden embassies, ventured into the depths of Draugr-infested catacombs, sunken frost-trolls to their knees in snowy hellscapes—and from dust-coated ruins in the pits of crypts, you’ve unearthed dragon shouts that you’ve kept close to your chest until the moment you might need to unleash a force larger than yourself. You’ve journeyed through the bioluminescent bowels of Blackreach, experienced the apocalyptic fever-dream landscapes of the Black Books, and traveled to the underworld and back to unearth the secrets of a universe spanning time, space, and multiple dimensions.
There isn’t a single fact in this universe that can shake you now, you think. You made a literal deal (a truce) with this world’s idea of a devil (a dragon) before crossing the threshold of a portal to Sovngarde and emerging into the Hall of Valor with the ghosts of legends at your flank to aid you in battle.
But the battle itself is a blur: all this buildup for the inevitable, unremarkable conclusion. When the World Eater collapses to your feet and the heat of his final flaming breath fades, you have only a moment to revel in your victory before something like warped empathy twists in your gut. Because despite the enormity of it all, you realize it isn’t too difficult to think like Alduin. You would be lying if you said you didn’t feel your neural pathways alighting from the fantasy that in this universe, you could finally have it all: the whole world and all its power to fill the void that has pushed you into the depths of such insatiable loneliness in the first place. [Where is your companion now? As hours are sunken into your story, your boyfriend recedes into a fixture in the room, and later, a figment of your memory. You once required him by your side to brave whatever challenges laid in wait, but before long, you begin to anchor yourself on the couch on days when your boyfriend has a shift and you don’t. He leaves for work only to return and find you still sitting there, absorbed in this world all your own, and maybe this is when you realize that the entire buildup to your relationship would always ultimately conclude in the inevitable outcome of his leaving you to face your biggest battles alone.]
February (Sun’s Dawn), 2018; my mouth utters spells like dreams: contemporary author names and literary titles melding into conjuration commands and dragon shouts and the simple Spanish names of dishes that have been cleansed of their lore and washed of their flavor.
<Quest Started: SEASON UNENDING>
Though you may have defeated the World Eater, a world that still exists is a world that is still in peril. For now, it is enough to know that other questlines await, each one promising to satiate your hunger for victory after victory. But even as you push forward, you can’t help but think back to the first dragon you felled just outside Helgen—an anonymous peon in comparison to the named nightmares you would eventually face. How terrified you were to confront such a fearsome foe, how shaken you felt as the beast collapsed to your feet. A crowd had circled around you then, proclaiming you hero as the dead menace’s soul radiated into your veins, and you told yourself that this victory was likely handed to you in your generous tutorial.
But your skills only continue to progress—as does your fortitude, magicka, and stamina. Soon you realize it is no longer a fluke—you are no longer a fluke. You’ve dedicated hours of yourself to this playthrough, and unlike in the real world, there is a direct correlation between effort and result. In a matter of weeks, you can harness the ancient power of the Thu’um to call down the winged beasts that once terrorized Tamriel. You’ve made allies of this world’s most powerful beings, and made enemies of all who stand in your way. You may not be the maker or destroyer of worlds, but here you discover something vastly more intoxicating: a universe where you can make and destroy yourself at will over and over.
Here, you discover your both/and place: the place where you can be cat and woman, lover and fighter, mage and warrior, scholar and assassin, thief and hero. You are infinite; you are multitudinous. You, whose Voice is powerful enough to tame and ride dragons. You are a prophecy come to life, the one this world has been waiting for. You are chosen. You are worthy. You are Dragonborn.
March (First Seed), 2018; it is six months since I first began cohabiting with the boy I promised to love unconditionally, and three months since our first Christmas together, when I gifted him the promise of a world he could escape into.
Memory works in mysterious ways: why is it that I can’t remember the exact moment when I defeated the boss I’d spent so many hours of my life hunting, but I am unable to forget the unremarkable dinner I made the night my universe was shattered?
Among the many details seared into my brain: the sound of his keys in the hallway on that cold, black evening; the door unlocking falteringly; my perfected NPC-girlfriend smile met by flushed cheeks, furrowed brow, quivering lips. The way he freezes in place when I stand to kiss him. The way he grips his notebook and says he wants to talk. Why do you look like you’re about to break up with me?
The way he utters his pitiful desire to continue seeing his ex—a hollow offering cloaked in the guise of compassion and concern for her wellbeing.
This is an ambush.
My mind becomes stunningly lucid. A voice that hardly feels like mine makes a bold claim that turns out to be true: he never truly sacrificed her to begin with, did he? The day he promised me was the last he’d see her, he asked if I wanted to accompany him. I told him I trusted him, that this was a quest I believed him capable of handling alone—without an assigned companion.
But he did not break things off with her then as promised. He fucked her on a couch in his or her basement and never looked back, an event whose consequences severed our once-shared timeline into two fractured fantasies of unattainable worlds.
Once, a simple walk from Riverwood to Whiterun could have easily been your last. Blood hot, fingers spasming over a console [his console, my gift to him] that had practically melted itself into your palms by this point, you wondered at the injustice of it all.
But in truth, this occurrence was nothing more than the product of random chance: an outcome you had refused to consider in your arrogant belief that because you willed it so, you could shape your own story. To succeed, to survive, you need only to forge ahead again and again until chance and fate align with the person your story is shaping you to be. You need only to want to live more times than the algorithm is lucky enough to send someone or something strong enough to be able to find and destroy you.
<Quest Started: SOVNGARDE>
I am nothing if not a girl who is an extension of her mother’s all-consuming rage, an intergenerational heirloom that is both a two-handed weapon and a suit of heavy armor. A piercing howl rises from somewhere deep within my chest, as innate to me as a dragon’s shout, a thing whose name I needed to learn only once in life to harness and unleash it upon the world.
More details seared into my brain: the way the bowl in my hand flies against the wall and shatters into pieces like an orb of magelight breaking against the damp, eggshell-toned wall. The way I wish in vain that I could shout him against the wall or turn invisible or make him succumb to the unrelenting force of my pain when all I can do in reality is ask him WHY? and all he can offer in response is, I’M SORRY, I’M BROKEN, I LOVE YOU, I TOLD YOU, I’M FUCKING BROKEN!
The way there isn’t a chasm deep enough in the world for me to disappear into—Dwemer mines be damned. The way my back hits the wall and he follows, palms up. The way I beg him—warn him—to stay away. The way he doesn’t listen, of course he doesn’t: he’d never truly heard me in the first place.
The way the blow sounds before I witness the damage it causes. His cheeks red as his eyes, surprise flashes across his expression. The thunder promised by my warning flash of lightning. The way he doesn’t retreat. The crack of another blow. And maybe another. The way I wish I knew the name of an afterlife that wouldn’t be too good for him.
In time, there are so many chips and holes in the wall I feel tempted to tell the kind, nervous superintendent who visits days later, spackle and hole-patch to spare, that a dragon must have laid siege here.
I sleep less and eat less. My skin begins to bear wounds that even a spellsword who has learned the magic of Restoration cannot heal—my arms marred by abrasions punishingly made in the midst of overwhelm and grief. In Skyrim I have mastered the magic of Destruction, but in this world I know only the curse of self-destruction.
<Quest Started: DRAGONSLAYER>
November (Sun’s Dusk), 2024; for years, I searched for a world that did not exist in the bleak landscapes of boys I knew I could get lost in. I wasn’t looking for a walkthrough. I see this only half a decade later, only now that I am on the cusp of thirty, only now that I have reveled for just shy of four years in the loving embrace of a sweet, Nordic-featured boy whose face no longer appears to me in my dreams despite his being the literal and figurative manifestation of everything my childhood self once hoped and prayed for: an unfaltering companion who loves me unconditionally, who would follow me to the ends of the earth without hesitation.
Still, I am nothing if not a girl whose spirit was forged in the rough kiln of conquest. I dream of boys with dark hair and darker eyes, of girls with curved lips and fragile figures, of a chasm deep enough to disappear me. I know now that there is no one boss who rules me: that the versions of myself who exist are as many as the nameless dragons swarming the skies of Tamriel to this day.
There are many hungers it is better to deny than feed, a winged ally once warned me. I know he is right, but I also know that on most days, when searching for the light behind my eyes in a bathroom mirror, I am greeted not by the gaze of a girl who is satisfied, but by phantom wisps of want and hunger, incurable loneliness, and interminable fantasy. I know both that I have traveled so far and yet only now found names for the demons that plague me, not least among them a crippling fear of abandonment and a ceaseless yearning to satisfy the ever-draining dopamine center in my brain. Test. Affirmation. Test. Failure. Retest. Affirmation. Heartbreak. Retest. Quest completed—a new quest begins.
December (Evening Star), 2024; from Boston, the Nordic-featured boy who loves me unconditionally asks me to choose him. From Minneapolis, I swear there’s no one I’d rather watch the world burn with. It isn’t enough: we both know this. I love you, I’m sorry, I’m queer, I’m sorry, I’m confused, I’m sorry, I’m fucking broken, My ADHD is killing me, my brain is broken, you know this, I love you—
Since the age of seventeen, I have never once embarked on an adventure without a companion. Not even as the dragonslayer herself—accompanied first by the humorously serious Lydia, and second by the mysteriously unattainable Serana.
I keep these questions close to my chest as I contemplate a new playthrough for the first time in half a decade: What would it mean to live in a world where there is nothing and no one to fight for but my own freedom and myself? To choose me? To live with the conviction that I am worthy without proof? To be my own hero and my only hope—the light in my own black eyes, the strength in my bare hands, the power in my Voice? To push the world harder than it pushes back?
I am nothing if not Dragonborn—thank God I realized this part of my diagnosis in time to rescue my console and my game, through which so much of my story still lives, from the pile of loot my ex boyfriend was allowed to take with him when he left.
“Power. You have it, as do all dov. But power is inert without action and choice. Think of this as the fire builds in your su’um, in your breath. Su’um ahrk morah. What will you burn? What will you spare?” —Paarthurnax, Grandmaster of the Greybeards, Teacher of the First Tongues
