This page resonated with some readers while being word salad to others. Let's see if I can break it down. Will is talking about how his relationships have failed. His therapist asks, somewhat rhetorically, if failure itself is the pattern Will is trying to correct. But Will now understands that he's caused and experienced the most pain by denying the failure. He can't bear to turn the person he's loved into a stranger. So he lets his mind wander somewhere else, somewhere it wants to go, while pretending to still be present in that failed relationship. It's an alienated state - the body brooding and restless, the mind grasping.
As to Eve's journey, she is in Union Square under a looming installation known as Metronome (also the title of this chapter). At night the park is often roped off and pitch black - a rare and eerie place to feel alone. As the name implies, Metronome is a clock, measuring the time until midnight. Though it once felt infinite, Eve and Will can only ignore it for so long. They are repeating patterns, nursing unresolved injuries, searching for something unknown, all at the expense of time. This is a theme I'll touch on a few more times before OP ends. Time is indifferent to their plight, it's just happening, whether they're ready for it or not.
5 thoughts on “#873-875 – traveling back and forth”
liz
I always thought Eve was looking at some kind of stock market ticker…
theforeignexchangers
I was once in NY for an 8hr layover and after wandering around the city, I met up by coincidence with the metronome and was transported to this page. This webcomic forever marked me and that was the moment I realized it.
hannah
I love Metronome's presence here, and totally forgot about it being this way since its new function as of September this year as a climate clock (speaking of something that once felt infinite and now completely impossible to ignore).
leaf
when I first read this page it definitely felt like word salad to me. i was probably freshly 20? or something like that. a few years older, it’s starting to make a little more sense.
rob
Interesting that this probably struck me as word salad when I first read it, but going through again for the first time in ≈5 years it might be the single most resonant page so far. OP really just got better and better as it went, and it was already very solid to begin with