“…what happened? Did you find her?”
“…No.”
                -Chris W. Kim, Adherent

                [Plot spoilers ahead!] I’m not sure what to think of Adherent. At its heart it’s about Em, a young woman growing up in a small quietly post-apocalyptic society, and her search for a writer whose scribbled notebooks seem to hold some secret. Some treasure. Some curious hope. The story’s a fable, maybe, about how hard it feels to communicate. After a long journey through different communities (a kind of travel that people in Adherent don’t usually do), Em finds the writer. She talks to them. She sees the way forward that the writer is pointing, and decides she won’t follow it. The writer will never go back home. Em wants to. When she gets back, Em’s friend asks if she found the writer. After the quiet beat of a still frame Em answers, “No.”
                I think Kim overturns, or perhaps rewrites, that trope about ‘getting everything you dreamed of and it’s nothing you want.’ If I get what I wanted, and it turns out rotten, empty, then it feels like I’ve done something wrong. I’ve desired wrong. The world’s horizons pull in. I’ve read that story. But instead, in Kim’s hands, the journey isn’t finished. It’s not that I started running and it turns out regularly running sucks (true story. Why do people do that?). It’s that I thought about more regular habits of delight in movement, fast-hearted joy in sweat, and the first way I tried wasn’t it. No. Which opens the way for more possible yesses. If the story I usually read closes down the world, limits that sense of possibility and wonder, Kim’s story gently opens far horizons and the leaves at my feet. The last pages of Adherent show us the forest. Scattered leaves. I haven’t found the connection I meant to find. But there is so much possibility here.