End of Life Care was my third Twine project and the one I'm the most proud of. It's a short story about navigating the US health care system while suicidal, and while I thought of it as a horror piece while writing it, it probably reads closer to surreal or black comedy than anything else.
I wrote the initial draft for it in a depressive episode after attempting to seek help for my increasing suicidal ideation. Unfortunately for me, that happened to be mere days before the US went into lockdown in 2020. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, my worries about the specific, nuanced ways the US health care system fails patients seeking relief from suicidal impulses seemed almost quaint in comparison to how it was currently failing the country as a whole.
I did wind up eventually revisiting and polishing that draft, and I'm glad that I did. This is probably the single strongest piece of writing I've completed, and also the one that reached the widest audience, being a part of the Queer Games Bundle 2021. That wider reach also meant that I got more feedback than ever on this piece, and given the sheer number of people who responded to it with mutual understanding, it feels like I really did hit on something important.
From a technical perspective, I feel like this is the story that best captured my use of intentional timing to invoke feelings of dread. While the beats in my previous game sometimes feel like they lack refinement (especially given years of distance), this piece has always felt on-point to me, no matter how many times I revisit it.
Additionally, this is also the piece where I feel like I utilized repetition to its fullest--repeating phrases and passages over and over again like mantras to create the sensation that things are wrong in a way that's not readily expressible.
(Weirdly, it's also the only thing I've ever written to make its way onto IFDB.)