[Short Story] You Don't Get to Fall In Love: A Gamer's Guide

Player Notes:
I’m sure you, being the person that you are, are already aware of the rules of the game You Don’t Get To Fall In Love. However here are a few additional notes:

There are many possibilities but only one ending. In this guide I’ve attempted to select for you the least painful options for each level. You will still encounter trauma, but there is no point increasing suffering when the ending is ultimately the same.
With the new update, at any time you can hit “N” for the “Never Try Again” Option. Otherwise, the game will play in a continuous loop.

Amoeba
As a protist floating in the primordial soup, time does not exist for you. You spend most of your days extending and retracting your bulbous pseudopods in order to feed off the dead matter forming a latticework above your head.
After an infinity of ignorance, you’ll one day come across a group of amoeba with branching pseudopods, as opposed to your bulbous tubes. Occasionally the amoeba will float into one another, their branches groping, reaching, touching each other in the dark viscous waters. Since you’re not a sentient creature, you’ll not understand why at this moment you begin to gather enough food for the exhausting process of self-replication.

Attempt to self-reproduce. Before your cytoplasm split in half, die.

Wolf
The other wolves nip at your belly and only let you feed on the worst parts of the elk. In the winter cold they pushed you out of the warm huddle in the cave so that with your back pressed to the cave wall frozen crystalline droplets of water formed on your topcoat. Attempt to integrate yourself with the pack as they run underneath the low moon in untouched Northern forests, even though no matter how fast you run, and no matter how well you howl, they will never accept you.

You see her with her chestnut red fur and the tuft of white underneath her snout. She raises her chin from the ribcage of the elk so that you can see the blood dripping from her chin. A predatory, ancient instinct will stir in your belly. It is an instinct that feels older than the layers of sediment underneath you and the glacial mountains above you. You must find a mate. You must pair with her because if you do not when your canus heart ceases to function there will be no one to carry your blood across the forest, to bare teeth in the hunt. This is all that matters.

Follow her into the cave. If you lose track of her you can always follow the drops of blood that welled on her chin and dropped into the snow. When you find her, attempt to nuzzle her cheek because you know this will be real warmth, you know this will make up for the nights the pack pushed you out of the huddle onto the frozen wall

You do not get to attempt to mount her. She will growl and nip at your throat and your blood will mingle with the blood of the elk. When she runs out of the cave you will lay in the cold, scratching at permafrost, listening to the sound of your chuffing breath through the filter of certain death.

Gothic Poet
Acquire a healthy amount of self-loathing, then an eating disorder so that you do not follow in the wake of your obese mother. Douse the potatoes in vinegar. Eat nothing but dry biscuits for three days. Ask an acquaintance to pinch parts of your body to revel in your wasting away. Build hatred like a wall in your stomach to protect yourself from the world, because the world is cruel and if you let it get inside it will turn your blood into rot.

You know that you cannot fade despite the fade of your body so tame bears and nurse rabid dogs and sleep with cousins and chambermaids and become the father of a scientist.

Write a poem about a womanizer being consumed by the women he adores, a soft shell that exists only to be pried open with weaknesses.

Write another poem about how nothing can buy you happiness so you’re forced to travel the world like an eternal pilgrim seeking the substance of a substanceless earth, because despite all your fortune at night your stomach still howls like an angry wind.

Travel from room to room in your gothic castle. Each room houses a young woman with soft curls that fall against her cheekbones and freckles that lightly kiss the sides of her face. Each woman wears a different colored nightgown, red or blue or gold, laced in the back, as if lashing her to the bed.

They will be seduced by your thinness and poetry and fortune and the way that you brush their curls away from their cheeks. Make love to them while poetry races through your mind. Find yourself unable to focus on sex, her breasts in ruptured moonlight, the way she breathes with her back arched toward you, because you’ve been working to build a wall to separate yourself from the experience that could save you. You filter motions into ghost-words that rest pale and inert on pages.

The Modern Working Man
Think if only her insides were pliable, made of wires and magnetic strips, you’d understand the configurations necessary to make her pause and look at you from across the room. But she is made of meat, and she is in love with someone else, and she sips her martini and continues to smile for another person.

Exit the party and go home. Make macaroni and cheese, feed your cat, and construct seemingly valid reasons for why you’re unwillingness to talk to her is a strength instead of a weakness. In your home the curtains are always drawn, and the glow from your computer a nightlight for your insomniac spectacles.

Write a program for a chat-bot that only says “Tell me more.” because you want somebody to listen to you but you do not have the kind of friends that can be burdened with your emotions.

Wish that you could be mechanical steel, transform your ribs into a case to house coolant instead of a heart.

Your cat is dead. Take your dead cat to the veterinarian, who says, predictably, “There’s nothing we can do.” Take home the cremated remains of your cat in a tiny cedar box and realize there is not a living creature left alive that will touch you. Do not get another cat. Only remember the touch of soft things like a burnt out memory from a past life you don’t believe in. Mold your fingers into the shape of a hopeless cave.

Think of the woman at the party. Think “Forget her, there are plenty of fish in the sea.” Do not believe this as something intrinsically, but as a platitude that lonely men tell each other. Cut your hair. Buy new clothes. Go to a bar and order a martini and wait.

The martini will remind you of her and it’s almost as if when you drink it you can taste the way that she’d touch you.

And wait.

Post-Human
Living in a virtual world with no body but infinite shapes, you’re unfortunately limited to your imagination which is lacking. You construct for yourself a spaceship to travel to distant planets. When you get to the edge of the solar system, you go onto the bridge and stars rush through your skin, into your veins, and explode through your eyes.

You’re bored.

Teleport yourself to a colony of people that’ve constructed themselves into energetic, colorful vibrations. They spend their days sending each other telepathic hums to construct orchestras of emotion. Some of them spend years holding the frequency of torpor, or melancholy, or elation. Orbit them for a few days as unrefined loss, before drifting away.

Spend a few days in a valley of doll parts, constructing life-sized silicon lovers without brains. They do not kiss so much as hold their mouths agape. Become uncomfortable with the feeling of warped flesh pressed against your chest and the pool between your hip bones, flesh that stretches like a ream of fabric.

Go home. Walk through the front door and be confronted by the first lover you ever created - a woman who lounges on your couch in a silk negligee, dark hair like you liked it. When she sees you, she’ll say, “Would you like me to cook dinner? Would you like a massage?”

Burn your house down.

Nothing is permanent in this universe. Energy can, in fact, be created or destroyed.

Construct for yourself a new lover. You were clumsy in your first attempt, you were young to this virtual reality and didn’t understand what you wanted. Your thoughts and desires were puerile creatures who barely grasped the edges of consciousness. Create a tiny redhead who can fit in the palm of your hand. She’ll kiss your cheeks and sleep in the refrigerator of your new home which you’ve constructed on the moon.

You will not create a lover that satisfies you because you do not understand satisfaction.

If you leave your redheaded lover in the refrigerator and travel outside of your home you’ll meet a woman with fire for hair, her limbs stretching out into the cosmos. She’s creating terrariums for sick children. She’s giving warmth to the people stretched and frozen in glacial prisons. She’s got a planet for a digestive system. Imagine walking along its surface, sleeping in the dunes, climbing the ancient oak trees.

Imagine, but do not approach her. Do not talk to her. Pass through her planet like a photon, blinking in and out of existence.

Continue your search across an infinite space stretching further by the second, for the thing that will finally, ultimately, resolutely, make you happy.

Author's Note: This was originally written for anthology about Borges-like video game guides, but was later rejected for not being game-like enough.

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Stock photo from Pixabay

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[Flash Fiction] The Astronaut in the Interstellar Museum of Sentient Species
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