Chapter 156: Day 155

Day 155,

Morning thought: I’m almost disturbed by how okay I feel.  

Yesterday’s events feel like little more than a bad dream, albeit an especially vivid one.  In truth, I’ve felt worse following the nightmares of the Catacomb Depths.  I need look no further than the scraps on my hands and knees and the lingering soreness of my wrist for evidence that it was more than that, yet when I look at them, poke and prod them, there are no flashbacks, no dawning horror of the reality of that phantasmagorical crowd.  Just an “Oh, I guess that really did happen.  Huh.”

Is this what it means to be repressing trauma?  Is my mind fogged by some fae influence that makes the encounter coincidentally (intentionally?) easier to bear?  Or was the whole experience so far removed from my ingrained past world sensibilities that I simply can’t accept and process it all as having been “real” on a subconscious, emotional level to be fully affected by it?

Whatever the reason, I’m satisfied just to be functional and in relatively good health.

 

Waiting for the laundry to dry.  Never got the chance to hang it up yesterday.  I didn’t get up until sometime around noon but Maiko tried doing it in my absence.  She did a better, less crease and stretch inducing job than I did my first try, I’ll give her that.

It’s funny, as little as the expected emotional repercussions of yesterday’s ordeal seem to be sticking, my mind keeps going back to the seemingly unanswerable why’s of it all.  For instance, why bring me out there in the first place and dance me around in front of what I presume are other nature sprites?  Was it like a child showing off a new favorite toy?  A public declaration that “my” sprite has claimed me so I’m off limits to the others?  Or perhaps the opposite: “my” sprite finally growing bored of me and auctioning me off to the others.  Maybe it was some manner of trial; that I’d been observed dancing in the rain and between that and the incident with the western rhythm “my” sprite was trying to induct me into being one of them.  If it was such a trial, I surely failed.

And what of the Wandering God?  Was the gathering some sort of ritual to summon it?  But if that’s the case then why would they all leave as soon as it appeared?  Unless perhaps I was meant as an offering and none of them wanted to be taken instead.  If that’s the case, then their offering was not accepted.  I can’t bring myself to accept the notion that it showed up to save me.  I’m not even sure it noticed I was there.  Perhaps the Wandering God was simply wandering through and interrupted whatever was happening by accident in a fortuitous coincidence for me.

What am I to the nature sprite?  It seems every time I start to think it’s out to help me in its roundabout way or begin to find it strangely endearing, it does something horrifying.

Perhaps the better question is what is it  to me?

Oh, also, I’m going to need to pick up a new block of laundry soap next market day.  I think we left it with the basket.

 

I’m back at the archive.  Still planning to meet with Vernon for dinner soon, as scheduled.  There are some requests piled up, but I’ll deal with them after class tomorrow.

In a moment suggesting that I was perhaps not as unaffected by yesterday as believed, I found myself asking Maiko if she would walk to the Village with me.  For the portion she can safely do so without being seen of course.  When I thought about the prospect of traveling that cobblestone corridor through the trees alone for the better part of an hour, I’d found myself hesitant to go through with it.

Thankfully, she agreed to accompany me.  We didn’t talk much during that commute, but I was grateful for her presence nonetheless.  When we neared the Village proper and it was time to part ways, I found myself feeling the urge to hug her.  I did not.  It didn’t seem like the sort of thing she would go for.

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I didn’t really register it at the time, but looking back, it occurs to me that she was talking the whole way back to the house last night.  I find that break from her norm offputting.  Just how worried did I have her last night?  How bad did I look when she found me?

I hope those villagers she saw don’t start making a habit of visiting the spring.  She seemed to like that spot.

 

Dinner with Vernon was… refreshing.  True to his prediction, the chosen venue had few other people there, which was nice in and of itself.  As much as I didn’t want to be alone today, I really wasn’t up to dealing with crowds either.

He’d changed out of his mediator uniform yet was still wearing far too heavy a coat for this climate.  I may not be one for showing skin (laundry day with no one around but Maiko notwithstanding), but I still don’t know how he manages it.  His demeanor certainly showed no signs of overheating, nor other discomfort for that matter.

He greeted me with his usual good cheer.  A different sort of cheer from Lin’s energized playfulness.  More like a relaxed, confident optimism that even if there are low spots life and the world are ultimately good, and even if they have bad days or make mistakes people are generally pretty great and that includes you.  Most people that I’ve heard talk about him paint him in similar broad strokes to that.  It’s an attitude that tends to not unpleasantly infect the tone of any conversation with him.

The tone of the evening thus described, I suppose I’ll move on to recounting the actual conversation.  We started with the usual niceties and greetings.  What we’d been up to lately, etc.  I talked about being a (probably?) first time teacher, let myself get overly-enthused about the blackboard all over again, briefly mentioned the extrapolated census project, and - after a quick check that we wouldn’t be overheard - a bit about living with Maiko as a sort-of-roommate.  Meanwhile he talked some about his work and his wider social web of friends and acquaintances.  Both surprised me in their own way.  

The work talk because he spoke little of the mediations themselves and more about interactions with his fellow mediators and guards (apparently Martin actually has a sense of humor if you get to know him).  He said that with the nature of what he does, talking too much about it feels like unfairly gossiping about other people when they’re at their worst.  The only reason I heard as much or got as involved as I did with the matter of Bartolome and his feuding sons was due to my role as Archivist being relevant to the resolution.  I commented that in retrospect it seems a little strange that I haven’t gotten more of that.  In a tone halfway between pride and amusement, he said that keeping things from escalating to the point of being notable enough for me to record is kind of their job.

As for the anecdotes about his social life, I suppose it caught me off guard because I’d never really thought about that part of him before.  In my own little circle of friends that I’ve gathered none of the rest of us really have that.  I have a tendency to hide myself away in the archive or at my house, only talking to people for business and not making an effort to connect with them beyond that.  Until recently Cass spent most of her days either on the farm or manning her family’s stall on market days.  I suppose she must have spent her rainy seasons in school when she was younger, but she’s never mentioned having friends her own age from that, no one ever comes to visit with her, nor has she ever said anything about going to visit anyone besides her brother and sister-in-law (does the Village actually have laws for that term to apply?).  I suppose she can be a bit, well, “abrasive” isn’t quite the word I’m looking for but it’s actually not hard to imagine her not making many friends.  Meanwhile, Maiko grew up in the woods actively avoiding human contact out of fear and doesn’t seem keen on changing that much more than she already has anytime soon.  And Lin… well, I get the impression that she used to have a fairly vibrant social life but gradually drifted away from everyone.

Which is all a long way of saying that the rest of us don’t really socialize outside of eachother.  I guess that makes Vernon the group’s token extrovert.  Funny how easy it is to forget people have lives outside of the slice you see when they’re around you.

Also, of course, it wasn’t me dumping all my stuff then Vernon talking about himself for the rest of the evening.  Nor were the topics so nicely categorized.  It was a long, meandering back and forth drifting from topic to topic.  Mostly forth with me saying only small bits at a time and giving him prompting to go on until he’d long since lost his train of thought.  And that was more than a little intentional on my part, and for the same reasons that I left out my last visit with Pat and didn’t mention yesterday’s events beyond citing “just some nature sprite weirdness” when Vernon mentioned I looked distracted early on.  The truth is I didn’t want to think about myself or my problems tonight, I wanted to drink in someone else’s life.

There was one thing I did get around to asking that I’d been meaning to for some time, and that was inquiring into the source of Vernon’s spectacles.  He asked if I needed a pair myself  (a question that made me hesitate for some reason) but I told him my eyes were fine, I just had another potential use for similar glasswork.  When he asked what I started going on about that half-forgotten idea of mine to try to make a microscope and examine some crystals with it to get a better idea of their composition.  Maybe find out if they were actually rocks or something alive like coral.  Vernon told me the glassmaker - who lives out near the western coast of the island has made magnifying glasses and spheres before, but not, to his knowledge, anything as tiny and precise as what I was describing with the microscope.  Might be possible though.

And thus the evening carried on into the night with the two of us being among the last to leave the eatery and making our apologies to the proprietor for keeping the place open so late.  I accepted Vernon’s offer to walk me “home” to the library.  I did hug him as we prepared to part ways.  I figured he might be more receptive of such a gesture than Maiko.  It felt nice, but once the moment passed I was terribly embarrassed and began apologizing.  He laughed it off (in a “trying to lighten the mood and reassure” way, not a “laughing at you” way) and said that it was fine and nothing to apologize for.  And that, besides, it wasn’t the wildest gesture someone’s made toward him at the end of the night.  I responded with a nerve-tinged laugh, said that I’m sure it wasn’t, hoped it was too dim for him to notice me blushing, thanked him for the evening and bid him goodnight.

I do hope he didn’t take that the wrong way.  As I said before, I’ve no romantic intentions toward him, emotional nor physical.  It’s just… I really needed some kind of emotionally positive physical contact with another person.  Comfort.

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