storms of possibility
NOTE: This post discusses events in the final episode of the game Life Is Strange in detail.
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A few days ago, I wrote about the climax of the film L.A. Story, in which a storm happens and, by happening, opens up possibilities that would otherwise have been closed off. Steve Martin’s weatherman–sorry, meteorologist Harris says to Victoria Tennant’s Sara,
All I know is, on the day your plane was to leave, if I had the power, I would turn the winds around, I would roll in the fog, I would bring in storms, I would change the polarity of the earth so compasses couldn’t work, so your plane couldn’t take off.
And that’s what happens. They were going to be apart but because of the storm, they are brought together. It’s a different timeline, a different world.
Yesterday, I started reading 10:04 by Ben Lerner, and early in the book, a storm doesn’t happen, and by not happening, it closes off possibilities that might otherwise have opened up.

I turned to Alex and watched the colors from the movie flicker on her sleeping body, noted the gold necklace she always wore against her collarbone. I tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then let my hand trail down her face and neck and brush across her breast and stomach in one slow motion I halfheartedly attempted to convince myself was incidental. I was returning my hand to her hair when I saw her eyes were open. It took all my will to hold her gaze as opposed to looking away and thereby conceding a transgression; there was only, it seemed, curiosity in her look, no alarm. After a few moments I reached for my jar of wine as if to suggest that, if anything unusual had happened, it was the result of intoxication; by the time I looked back at her face her eyes were closed. I put the jar back without drinking and lay beside her and stared at her for a long while and then smoothed her hair back with my palm. She reached up and took my hand, maybe in her sleep, and pressed it to her chest and held it there, whether to stop or encourage me or neither, I couldn’t tell. In that position we lay and waited for the hurricane.
At some point I drifted off into strange dreams the radio penetrated and I woke with a start, convinced I’d heard shattering glass. It was 4:43 a.m. according to my phone, the menu screen of the DVD still on the wall, so we hadn’t lost power. I focused on what the voice in my ear was saying: Irene had been downgraded before it reached landfall, moderate flooding in the Rockaways and Red Hook, the phrase “dodged a bullet” was repeated, as was “better safe than sorry.” I got up and walked to the window; it wasn’t even raining hard. The yellow of the streetlamps revealed a familiar scene; a few branches had fallen, but no trees. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water and glanced at the instant coffee on the counter and it was no longer a little different from itself, no longer an emissary from a world to come; there was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm.
I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, “Everything is fine, I’m going home now,” said it just so I could say I’d said it in case she was upset later that I’d left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.
This last line is a reference to the film Back to the Future…

(10:04, pg. 10)
…a series which, as of this week, takes place entirely in the past.

And in a strange bit of synchronicity, bringing together these existing threads of storms and alternate timelines, the final episode of Life Is Strange came out this week, and I played it yesterday.
It presents you with a choice. Your actions during the first four episodes, jumping back and forth through time to help your friend Chloe and others, have created a meteorological disturbance, a tremendous storm that is now poised to destroy the town of Arcadia Bay and take many people with it.
You can go back to the moment it all began, and not do the things you’ve done. Chloe will die, but the town will be spared.
Or you can stay there with Chloe, saving her, your best friend, and look on as the storm hits.
Before you make this choice, you relive some of the moments you’ve shared with Chloe.





And the thing that makes Life Is Strange so rare and special to me is the way that it’s about moments and special connections, the way that a person can crack us open and know us better than anyone else, the way a person can change us, and reveal us anew to ourselves. It lets you live in these moments and feel them.







I did not even hesitate. It was not a hard choice for me. People are not interchangeable.


Almost everything doesn’t happen, and everything almost doesn’t happen. Do you ever really think about that?
I think of the ending of one of Spike Lee’s masterpieces, 25th Hour, how the father of Edward Norton’s Monty, played by a mesmerizing Brian Cox, tells his son of what could be if only they made the choice not to go to the prison where a seven-year sentence awaits Monty. He says that someday in the future, he can tell his children:

But in fact they continue on to the prison, and this doesn’t happen.
On January 21st, 2012, Masha posted an entry titled “Almost everything doesn’t happen,” which reads:
“Thomas Hardy wrote about people failing to meet as if these failures are scandalous occasions. What didn’t happen astounded him…How can it happen and how can it not happen? If a person has said he will be in a certain place, shouldn’t his body be as good as his word?…A chance meeting is a meeting that seems to exist with a great probability of not meeting circling around it. As we all know, almost everything doesn’t happen.”
Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress
It’s the equivalent of a storm, or a lightning strike, not only meeting the person who can crack us open and change our lives, but then having the circumstances in place that let us open ourselves up and discover what we can be to each other. Sometimes these possibilities almost materialize and then dissipate, like a storm that almost happens but doesn’t, giving us a glimpse of a different world but not letting us enter it.
I need the storm to happen in my life, the lightning strike that opens up a timeline that wouldn’t exist otherwise, and I need someone–the right person–to stand there and watch the storm with me. If I find them, I won’t give them up for anything.





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My earlier writing about Life Is Strange:
First, for VICE: We Were Younger: Life Is Strange and Nostalgia for the Moment
and on my blog: The Blue Butterfly: On Life Is Strange, Alternate Timelines, and Accepting the Things We Cannot Change
Notes
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What a great post.
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jedimb reblogged this from carolynpetit and added:
“People are not interchangeable.” ^That!Damn it, crying about LIS again!Another great read.
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