#the bride

This might be major cope because I don't like the prospect of Mellow dying, but I think that there is a new life waiting for Mellow, the Surgeon, and the Bride in a physical sense, not just a spiritual one. Mainly because that ending is, in the most visually disgusting and disturbing to think about way, a metaphor for the foundation of a family—A twisted shadow-puppet vision of a couple awaiting the birth of their first child. Family does seem to be the arc concept of all endings, after all.

Initially, the Bride's condition is so horrific that imagining she signed up for this fate somehow is almost impossible, but given her constantly shifting form during her route, it is possible that we never see her true form, underground or otherwise. Is she a fusion of two living women? One woman living and one long dead? One of her constituant bodies looks much worse off than the other in the underground, after all. But what if one takes a metaphorical tack here? Is she the woman that is and the woman that could be?

Consider the wife becoming the mother, impossibly suspended between selves, losing herself, becoming more, remaining the same despite overwhelming change. The imagery of alarming physical transformations in a medicalized backdrop is no accident either. The Bride is bearing the brunt of this procreative transformation by necessity. Death is a constant, looming threat, and pain is a certainty. And yet she calls Mellow. She does not call for escape nor revenge. She is calling for a new life, and she wants his help to become that perfectly merged version of herself that she has seen the promise of already, and the version she now suffers to bring into being.

And what about the Surgeon himself? Our would-be father in this frame of mind? He has never been closer to his unitive goal, yet the waiting period is unexpectedly, cripplingly isolating. He hoped to see his Bride flourishing as a new, merged being, but her physical torment has silenced her, turned her inward, and he must support her while he is, for all practical purposes, alone. He's reevaluating all of his past decisions, his values, even his views on spirituality. He battles with himself, numbs himself, stands his ground on his self-determination, and alternately melts in despair. But steadily, he shifts from guarding and guiding Mellow out of a kind of impersonal obligation to genuine affection. The waiting, the uncertainty, has changed him. The individualist cannot survive any longer. His meaning is in self-sacrifice rather than mastery. He has reverently surrendered. He wants to call Mellow his son.

And here we are at the moment of crisis. A child is entering their lives, by random chance in the eyes of the world, yet acknowledged as divinely given by the Bride who called to him for so long and by the Surgeon who comes to the realization that his devotion to humanity in the abstract and his self-centered ambitions amounted all to nothing without Mellow. Mellow has spent three distinct periods of time in the depths of the body. He has been monitored carefully at every stage, and the time has come at last. The walls contract, the heart races. A boy being born, and in a mystic fashion, his whole family is being born anew as well. The fearful yet magnificent future springs to life like the colosssus rising again in the desert. A new home is reborn from the sacrificial ending of a way of life, the burial of past sorrows, and the perfection of long-ago oaths of love.