First, press play (or not). Then:

"Tim is off an a search to rescue the princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake,

"Not just one, he made many mistakes during the time they spent together, all those years ago. Memories of their relationship have become muddled, replaced wholesale, but one remains clear: the princess turning sharply away, her braid lashing him with contempt."

The days after she retreated were hard, and Jim focused mostly on the arguments in the end. Trivialities like who owned the duvet they'd bought together or with whom the cutlery belonged.

After, Jim idled in thoughts about the altercations, petulant as they were. Little things lead to large words and grand divisions. And though he regretted them, it's strange how, at the time, such small dalliances led to such great divide. How such small things can lead loved ones to become so irretrievably riven.

"Our world with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we've learned from a mistake and become better for it, shouldn't we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake?"

Jim remembers a day soon after, and it was raining outside. Inside, he was soaked, empty cans of what-not around himself, pouring himself out into a notebook hazily.

A lot of it was incomprehensible. But one striation in the maelstrom of his thoughts was clear. A desire to do something about the situation, something wonderfully cliché: something like flowers or a bit of lugubrious postage.

He pined to come up with something that would merit redemption.

The words wouldn't come. The world seemed inert, and Jim was too. Time and choice were frozen. And then the moment passed. He practiced his instruments, and played his games. And a long duration elapsed.

"Visiting his parent's home for a holiday meal, Tim felt as though he had regressed to those long-ago years when he lived under their roof, oppressed by their insistence on upholding strange values which, to him, were meaningless. Back then, bickering would erupt over drops of gravy spilt on the tablecloth."

After she moved back to their hometown, Jim would only see her periodically when he returned for a family event. He hated this.

His family had become embroiled over the years about his slanted worldview and all dinner table conversation had become seized like a locking engine, cast into caustic resin.

Whenever he visited, at first opportunity, he would go out into the dimmer vales of his childhood. He would go to friends' houses, and she'd be there, and he'd see how she'd changed. How she'd found new friends. And time flowed forward, and when Jim saw her he would only get lost again in old lamentations.

Why is it that the tides of time can only ceaselessly rise, he thought, why cannot they also ebb?

He would see her at social gatherings, when he came home, in the background of a party's din. In mixed company, she kept her eyes carefully averted, most probably because his were fixed. Alone in a corridor, on the way to the bathroom, or outside for a smoke, her eyes seemed less recalcitrant, less defiant to meet his. And when they met his, they didn't look sanguine; they still looked only sad or angry.

His mistakes were grievous, and, it seemed, there was no way to take them back.

"For a long time, he thought they had been cultivating the perfect relationship. He had been fiercely protective, reversing all his mistakes so they would not touch her. Likewise, keeping a tight rein on her own mistakes, she always pleased him.

"What if our world worked differently? Suppose we could tell her: 'I didn't mean what I just said,' and she would say: 'It's okay, I understand,' and she would not turn away, and life would really proceed as though we had never said that thing? We could remove the damage but still be wiser for the experience."

In the darkened hollow of his own room, Jim stared at a glowing screen. If he reached out, he thought, years later, he might be able to amend all the terrible things. Time dampens, and sometimes time can be enough.

Duly contrived and crafted, a healing apology didn't seem without the realm of all occurrence. He yearned for rectification, and, though he was sure she had moved on, he stared at a blinking cursor. If words were options, they seemed limitless. But, to Jim, the words were an infinitely recombinant lock.

"He worked his ruler and his compass. He inferred. He deduced. He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. He was searching for the Princess, and he would not stop until he found her, for he was hungry. He cut rats into pieces to examine their brains, implanted tungsten posts into the skulls of water-starved monkeys.

"He scrutinized the fall of an apple, the twisting of metal orbs hanging from a thread. Through these clues he would find the Princess, see her face. After an especially fervent night of tinkering, he kneeled behind a bunker in the desert; he held a piece of welder's glass up to his eyes and waited."

The onus of finding the words that were just right was too much, and Jim balked. Surrounded by empty cans, he thought wistfully and sadly about his games. About a reality where he could rewind time. The cursor blinked metronomically in the darkened room. Behind him on the white wall flashed a small and sad silhouette: a morose and maudlin effigy.

~James D.

All quotes taken from Jonathan Blow's Braid.