Chapter 30: Day 29

Day 29,

Feeling better this morning.  Amazing how sleep helps with existential dread.  Although I do always get thrown through a bit of a loop waking up in the archive instead of the house.

 

Cass was waiting outside the front door when I opened up the library for the day.  It’s easy to sleep in with there being no windows in the archive or its hidden bedroom, and that’s not normally a problem since I end up opening around the same time I would get in from the outskirts.  But when your new assistant is used to getting up at the crack of dawn for farm work… well, that’s a scheduling concern we probably should have thought about.  Next time we’re both spending the night in town I should probably at least leave the front door unlatched.  Maybe find out if there’s a second archive key I can get her.

I apologized for keeping her waiting, she played it cool like it was no big deal and made a joke about old folks needing their rest.  I assured her I’m not that old, and for all we know I’m only a month old.  A comeback that I immediately regretted due to the obvious invitation of child and baby jokes.  Especially with her being here to teach me to read.

And so we spent the rest of the morning with me learning the alphabet.  It’s an incredibly weird feeling to be able to glance at complete sentences and know what they say but to not recognize any of the individual letters when presented with them in isolation or know what sounds they make.  The worst part is that dichotomy doesn’t even make logical sense.  At least the alphabet is a phonetic one.  That at least is a concept I can grasp well enough that I suspect my “previous” language was as well.

On the note of my… impairment… not making sense there were a few times where I was worried that Cass thought I was faking it, but when I said as much to her she just shrugged and said that she’d always heard outsiders were weird like that (not this issue specifically, just that “sometimes they don’t work the same as everyone else’).  She found it to be more intriguing mystery to solve than annoyance.  It’s funny how her demeanor changes when she’s actively working on helping someone with a task, whether it’s unloading a wagon, setting up her family’s market stall, or teaching basic literacy.  The usual smug, know-it-all brat gives way to a child who genuinely cares about being helpful and wants to be seen as doing a good job.  It’s only when the task is done, and she knows she’s done well or shown someone up that the initial side of her comes back to the fore.  And then there’s the unbridled wonder and excitement when she’s exploring a new place or seeing a new sight.  It’s almost hard to reconcile the kid laughing and running around the cathedral ruins with the one giving her signature look of superiority with the one patiently teaching the names and sounds of letters.  It’s tempting to call one or another a façade or mask, but that feels like an oversimplification.

I’m rambling now.  Point is, kids are people too.  Don’t write them off as one-dimensional just because they’re young.  Everyone has multiple faces if you look long enough to see them in different situations, and that’s not a bad thing.

Okay, still rambling.  Stop that.  It seems that the alternative reaction to existential dread in the face of cognitive weirdness is waxing philosophical about everything you come across.

From the alphabet (which I’m still going to need to practice to memorize enough to teach it to kids come rainy season) we moved onto individual words.  Those I seem to be able to handle well enough that we went ahead and started focusing on sentence structure and grammar.  Probably a little bit advanced for kids just learning to read and write, but at this point I think it was more about figuring out what I can and can’t easily process.  As previously established, if I try reading a whole sentence all at once it’s fine, but it seems that if I start concentrating on isolated fragments of sentences something about the structure and word ordering is slightly off from what I’m reflexively expecting and I start getting a headache.

We were still dealing with how to work through that when we realized it was late enough to be meeting back up with Cass’s family for the ride back to the outskirts.  Fortunately, there weren’t any visitors to the library today so lessons could go uninterrupted and we didn’t have to answer awkward questions about why the Archivist was practicing letters.  I suspect that’s going to be the majority of Cass’s assistant days for the near future rather than helping regular archivist work.  Not what either of us were expecting, but necessary if I’m going to be trying to teach it myself to even younger kids later on.

Still, I should probably try to plan another exploration trip to take her along on.  Those seemed to be what she really wanted out of this.  And I’d be lying if I didn’t have my own growing itch to explore.  Maybe invite Lin again too.  The two of them seemed to get along well enough and it’d be nice to have another adult around.

 

How old am I?  I can’t remember a specific number of years before arriving at the Village, but I have this perception in my head of “adult, but still young”.  Or at least not old.  The fact that I suspect my whole body is different confuses matters even further.  Comparing the look of my reflection to the people around me, I’d guess I’m of a similar age to Vernon and Lin.  Definitely younger than James.

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