Majora’s looping narrative is studded with missed connections, with people and not-people forever falling short of what they really want. Neighbors are angry and suspicious, divided over the danger of the moon’s oncoming collision, when truly it doesn’t matter if you stay in town to face it or flee for the hills because it’s bearing down anyway, those snarling eyes closer every hour. In what — I WILL FIGHT YOU I GODDAMN SWEAR — is the most poignant subplot in all of video game history, an innkeeper named Anju stays in the rapidly emptying town to wait for her cursed fiancé, Kafei, who has been transformed into a child. (It’s batshit insane that a series of Twilight fanfic has become so successful and yet I am no closer to reading the Anju-Kafei quadrilogy of my dreams.) And this pain is repeated over and over again! Even when you fix a problem in one cycle, it all resets in the next. It’s impossible to patch up the whole world at once.

And so, too, this world. You have your heart broken and then a month later you fall and bruise it again; you get through a summer of panic attacks only to wake up in a hotel room in winter and find yourself bent double, retching and shaking as a friend looks on in worry. Your sister is sick and then better and then back again, maybe, who knows this time what will help, who has ever really known. “How did I get back here?” you hiss. “Didn’t I solve this already? When do I get to rest?” There is such anger that comes with these cycles, such sick déjà vu, such directionless fear. What if this is how things are now, uncomfortable and irreparable and forever? What if this time, the moon actually falls?