Thank you so much for continuing to submit these. I was really looking forward to this.

Except for the portion dealing with the spider's eye, the fitness instructor's car, this was a more concrete section than the first part of the second chapter, and much more than the first chapter. I didn't read the text of your submission before I opened the link, so I didn't expect that to be the way you'd approach this. I don't know which method I would have reacted to more strongly. The last two pages raised my blood pressure as they were.

Having sat here and thought it over a little, I'm reminded of when I was a teenager and a friend texted me to tell me he was going to commit suicide. I can recall the helplessness I felt during the period between that text and my call to the police. Same agitation, same need to move. This felt very real. I am affected.

EXPERIMENTAL ELEMENTS

First:

forward, lift, back, lower; forward...

The function of this is not what I thought it would be. I saw the decreasing font size and my immediate thought was that the words were receding, as if they were taking up less and less of the "visual field" as they moved farther and farther away, signifying a moment when Benji would dissociate ("recede" from reality) and go to his ocean. But he didn't. He saw the real ocean instead. So that threw me off a little. I hope that makes sense.

Second:

EVERYTHING HURTS.

This worked well for me. I thought of this font size change in much the same way I thought of the first example: the size indicates how much of Benji's "visual field" it's occupying. Small font - he's seeing more than just what's being written, his attention is drifting away. Large font - this is all he's seeing. This is the only thing in his head. So this flowed perfectly for me.

The scattered words after that, I think would have hit just as hard whether or not they'd been formatted normally. It was the content, especially "legs" and "kick", that moved me, not their placement.

WHAT STOOD OUT

The tongue-slicing metaphor was given much more explanation than others have been. I don't think that's necessary for comprehension; it's a pretty straightforward one and a lack of explanation, at least to me, would have matched its abstractness more closely to the first two submissions. I only had to read this once to feel comfortable that I understood it, compared to the first chapter's three or four cycles.

And then I don't know if this will matter to you, I just figured I'd mention it, but there seems to be a missing word on page 21: "It is a tension with which I [am] all too familiar..."

I remain very invested in this and I'm anxious to reading more. I hope there's more.

Keeping this short as I really only have one complaint.

I don't mind the experimental elements, but the problem is that when I encounter the last instance of them (at the end) I have long since resorted to skimming.

What makes this hard for me to read is the long-windedness and frequency of the internal monologue. There's an endless torrent of description, of thoughts before impending action, of various mental imagery, of just about everything really. Alyssa asking Benji if he can stop staring at her and him leaving the club is a million times more impactful than sentence upon sentence of navel-gazing. Which brings me to the positive aspects of this story:

The dialogue and character interactions are really good, like A+ my eyes are glued to the screen good. I feel my heart sinking as Alyssa is waving to him through the window and he just leaves. I feel stings of pain from my own past when his instructor's desire to help is brushed aside by a prideful burst of anger. This stuff is very potent, but the rest of it, I just don't find it very interesting to read.

I'm trying to pin down why, and I think it is because apart from the character interactions we only ever get to see filtered imagery or rationalizations for how Benji is feeling. It's first person, but he's holding us at arm's length, opting to tell us about the vivid metaphor tapestry that he has woven instead of granting us access to his humanity.

While I think this habit definitely helps with establishing his character, it starts to feel very repetitive from rather early on.

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God, it would take me at least fourteen hours to write a decent two thousand words, to do this level of stuff in three is incredible. I could actually feel this -

boy oh boy did the catharsis hit me as I paced around my home at 1am last night, consumed by frantic energy

It's the real life adrenalized viscera of what you wrote and it made me grin like a fool.

So, I love this kind of writing, I actively adore intense literary prose bordering on poetry. Reading this I'm being that audience that appreciates this stuff, and it reminds me when I read other, completely different works in this sub that I should also try to be the audience for them - meet them where they are, so to speak. Be the chameleon, if necessary.

Ok meta contemplation aside, I'll detail the things I especially liked and why, and any issues I found.

Bottom of page 20, I loved the combination of a casual conversation 'Hi, Benji' with the horrifying eye of the spider. The sliding together of the surreal and banal in this passage was marvellous. (I actually went and put on Azealia Banks Tarantula because it seemed so apt, and then I played Recoil Want after I read on and saw 'want, want, want, want, want')

Next bit, is there a dialogue formatting issue here? First paragraph p.21, I had to parse it out a couple of times to work out who was speaking because it was all stuffed in the one paragraph. Wasn't sure whether it was deliberate but it took me out of the text I'd just been involved with so closely. There's also some points where the dialogue starts with lower case then switches back to upper, same thing.

Page 22, love the return of the eye. This line though

My focus returns to my grip on my wheels, and I let blood once again flow past my knuckles as I crinkle my forehead, releasing my eyebrows’ furrow.

It was better on a second read but first time through I got a strong sense of stage directions, it being little actions that all happen an a row, and I'm not sure whether the regrounding of Benji in the purely physical works here. It reads a bit passively with the 'let' and the 'releasing'; maybe that's the intention but I didn't like it so much.

Guilt raised the guardrails from twenty-nine inches to sixty, just as it let the fitness instructor elevate her self-esteem at the expense of my agency

This was wonderfully insightful. And the latter half of this page, 23, the physicality here is really good with all the super strong verbs although I'm sure the phrase 'feeling the coldness' could be a lot more visceral and emotionally connected. It does increase further on but I want to start being prickled by emotional hypothermia at this point rather than merely feel a bit chilly.

I welcome the cool crossbreeze that pierces my wool jacket, creeping inside the openings at my neck and wrists.

This line, this is utterly gorgeous in so many ways. This is the kind of thing I'd like to get a starting exploration of with the 'feeling the coldness' line. And yes, this is the point where Benji's resolve and calmness intersect with my increasing anxiety as I read, like a seesaw...

Everything hurts.

And here we head into poetic territory.

I love it.

I do think the formatting, the white space, the way we're supposed to flow through it might need some work, whether there's a way to write the struggles in longer sentence fragments interspersed with sharp, precise single words like gasps, whether the placement currently works (it's a little bit ribbon-like as I move my head back and forth). Graphic novels do this kind of thing particularly well, and I do feel like you almost need to graphic design this bit to get the most out of it.

I loved the denseness of the whole thing, the explorations of everything, the insightfulness and connections. This was my absolute favourite line:

Her stricken expression stays painted on her face as she dons her glasses and floats further downstream, the cackling returning in full as the eye joins its peers on the next main waterway.

I'm also interested that I had to go find the correct music with enough intensity to put me in the mood for this. I put on Jeff Buckley's Grace after those first two songs, it's always my go-to general background music for emotionality. Seemed particularly apt since he drowned and it still hurts that that happened.