(Once again the bold stuff comes from JubyPhonic's cover of "Lost Time Memory" Credit goes to her for that.)
Entry 2
“You okay?” With a worried kind of wail, I heard someone say to me just as I passed out… I wasn’t awake very long after I tipped my car over, turning too fast along a curb, but I remember how much it hurt for those few moments of consciousness. I had never felt that sort of pain before in my life. I thought I had but I was clearly kidding myself severely. I was happy to let darkness take me so I wouldn’t feel it anymore. I don’t know why I’m even writing in a journal like this now, speaking to no one but a piece of paper, and it goes without saying that things like you, a scrap of paper, wouldn’t ever get me, especially if my fellow humans seem to have trouble understanding me half the time. Speaking of halves for that matter…. I’m “lucky” that my left side took most of the impact. Meant they only had to cut off the weaker arm and leg... I use the term lucky very, very loosely if that wasn’t already clear. Now I’m just lying here, bandaged up, fewer limbs, along with a nearly completely damaged left eye by the way… waiting for the doctors to officially tell me if I’ll pull through any of this. You know those feelings of disappointment so commonly felt among most children and teenagers when things don’t go their way? When you’re around that sort of age range, unless there’s really something more going on there, you act so sad but it’s all just an act in the end. You’re living contently, you have luxuries a lot of people don’t, and you get the chance to feel disappointed over petty stuff. Then you lose the kind of stuff you thought you’d always have… like limbs… like people… suddenly then you actually get a taste of what sadness can really be. Today’s a haze to me, just like the past few days since I first woke up after everything… God knows how long it’s been since then, I’m sure the doctors and nurses have told me but I can barely remember some of the stuff they’ve said since this morning. I’d better become apathetic to this sort of thing soon, there’s no chance in hell I’m going to make it through all of this willingly otherwise. I have you in my thoughts still… not this piece of paper, no, I stopped addressing you a few sentences ago… I mean you… the person I nearly killed myself trying to find in the first place. Maybe it’s just my damaged brain, but, I sometimes think I feel your presence somehow… always in the form of the dry heat I felt that last day we saw each other. I felt it quite a bit the other day… I’ve got no other choice but to keep up the pace I had yesterday ‘cuz that’s the only thing I can do to help myself while I’m lying here bandaged up like a pathetic literal wreck. I don’t want your unique sort of heat to ever leave like the visions I still sometimes have of seeing you again in my sleep. Just visions though… not even dreams, they’re never clear enough to really be dreams… and if I can’t dream, you and me seeing each other again… That I’ll see… see you smile the way I know you did, but I can’t envision it anymore no matter how much I try… well I don't know what to do... But I still imagine I know exactly what it looked like, and that I’ll see it genuinely, and we will be so… happy… as friends, like it was before. Like I understand I’d want it to be at least. Now I see it. I see it, why can’t you be around for me to say it to you? To admit it to your face? If I can’t aspire to do that someday… well… clearly it’s better to just stay in a fantasy land where it’s possible. I’d rather hold on to the past than to let go. I’d get to live out those dreams, and never wake from them or I’ll break, again, from the shaking, violent forces of this damned outside world that tried to reject me by taking you away, by punishing me for trying to deny what was almost certain. The world doesn’t want me to see those happy days anymore, there’s no other answer for it. I tried admitting this to a nurse attending to me earlier, saying I just wanted to have time stop moving from now on, since I could never look out and see the new day the same way I once did, not like this. “But you can’t ever hope to see the daybreak again at all without tomorrow,” she tried to convince me. As if I would care in the slightest. I don’t want to see the daybreak again, it’s ruined for me now, it’s poison. It’s something other people can enjoy but I can’t anymore. With time just running by all these arid days, bringing with them beads of irritating sweat all over me, in so many places that I can’t comfortably reach with my remaining hand. That’s all I get out of these summer days that others are enjoying with each other, laughing, smiling, enjoying each other’s company, and I can tell from the voices I hear outside that this is happening. It’s all taunting, inadvertent, but nonetheless, it still feels like they’re mocking me by enjoying themselves like that. I try to get anyone attending to me to shut the window but they tell me I need some of that fresh air, and I really have to insist for them to finally relent and shut it for at least a moment, so I can tone out the evidence of those very days. It’s so bad that I’d kill just so they’d go away and leave me just a little bit of peace. It’s more than just the days, I don’t want to even see people anymore, let them all leave me be, sulking like this. Yes, I’d rather be all alone.
I’m sorry. Things got a little darker than usual there… as I was writing that I heard the doctor mention I wasn’t likely going to make it through the week. At least, that’s what I heard, and I nearly tore myself off this medical bed at the sound of it. They had to come rushing in and restrain me again, which, obviously wasn’t so difficult for them. So, that’s it then… my life’s coming to an end. Not even 18 years old yet, and kind no longer for that matter… just a hateful husk now. No one’s gonna remember me very fondly I’ll bet, I didn’t do much for that many people. There was her… but I ruined that and she’s not around to care anyway, my folks will be devastated, but, I’ll just be seen as some tragic case of what could have been to them probably in the end. And in these last moments all those medical people working on me will probably see me getting desperate for some miracle in these next few days, because I’m pretty much getting to that point where all I can hope for is to pray for something like that to happen. “Poor bastard, he cried to God earlier but he just can’t get stronger,” they’ll probably say. I’m too tired from the last squabble to try anything though. Right now all I can remember is how much I hate my past self, how much he squandered what he had, reaching out both his hands to hold on to such a pretty smile he can’t take for himself because it’s not his. Now I’m futilely going through these days fighting the constant light of suns flashing through my window, knowing I’m going to literally just waste away in such a small town with nothing but regrets… Oh god why can’t you free me somehow?! I want another chance at all this, let me have it, please! Why do I even bother asking…? The fight’s over, and suddenly every sigh I have tried to breathe in defeat gets caught up in my throat like somewhere deep inside I haven’t given up, there’s a stupid spark of hope in there somehow. I really wish that side of me got smart enough to know I was stopping now with all that.
No… can’t go back to that summer day. It hurts so bad, all of it, inside and out… I’m so damn fragile now, don’t ever touch this fragile bastard or it might break. Let’s face it, I’m already broken as it is. I’m gonna sleep now. Maybe I’ll wake up, maybe I’ll dream finally beforehand, at this point, either would be the luckiest thing to happen to me in ages.
Entry 3
I’m still trying to understand what’s happened. It all changed so quickly, and so unbelievably. I don’t even know why I’m writing this except to help rationalize this past experience as, well… real. Picture this… A voice is calling out to you, something indecipherable at first, but then you start to put together the words… “Can you hear me?” as everything else around you seems to just start disappearing. Then, you just, feel really… tranquil, peaceful, even though, inside, you can feel total and utter chaos brewing within. Then you look up and you see… something both amazing and ridiculous at the same time. A massive bird with a long beak that seems sharper than the finest knife. It looks almost cartoonish, like something out of an anime, and well, that’s probably because it is. It’s a Fearow, a Pokemon of all things… but it’s not simply that, this one’s feathers glimmer a brilliant golden hue, and lightning seems to constantly arc around it. Those who’ve seen it before me would tell me it’s called the Shiny Volt-Tackling Fearow… I’d call them insane if I hadn’t seen it myself on that particular night.
I remember too, how I thought that would be the last time I’d fall asleep, that I wouldn’t wake up the next day, so at first I’d figured this was the stuff of some coma fantasy before my mind shut-off for good, or maybe even the most bizarre and unexpected afterlife… but it was neither. Quite the opposite in fact. As I watched the creature fly down to face me, I heard something echo in my head, something asking me what it was that I desired most to change about myself, and deep down, something nestled within me came out. I replied that I wanted to be myself again, the me that I was before everything came crumbling down on me and turned me into such a hopeless and lifeless husk… but I wanted to be even better than I was, or at least, have to potential to be better, because I didn’t want my flaws to ruin yet another life like it did hers. A flash of the aviary beast’s lightning blinded me for a moment as I made my request, and I was back in my hospital bed… but as I regained consciousness, I felt something unexpected… I felt both of my missing limbs, and I saw them too, with perfect vision… They were back, my eye was fixed, and all the physical pain and agony I’d been suffering through was… just completely gone. I couldn’t explain it, but even stranger, the doctors all seemed to forget that I was gravely injured. All of them simply told me I’d dinged my head and I’d only been in the hospital to make sure I wasn’t concussed. I walked out of the hospital that day… I walked out… on my own… like everything had been a terrible nightmare. For a while I thought it had been, until I took another glance at my restored arm. It felt real, it worked just fine, but, something seemed to be making certain parts of it… glow? It wasn’t just a weird trick of the light. Through some miracle I had a cybernetic left arm and leg now, and all the internal stuff that had been damaged seemed to be replaced with unfathomably futuristic stuff too, which I could tell once I got the hang of my robotic eye. I won’t delve into the details over how and when I exactly found all this out, but… let’s just say when you pull your arm off for the first time and you can still feel it and work it like it’s attached to you… it’s just a teeny bit freaky.
This was to be my second chance at life. Somehow now it’s become clear. You know how sometimes you wonder about stuff that doesn’t make sense and eventually you just think about it a little more and go “ahh, so that’s the reason…” and accept that the details will probably never really be explained, that something beyond your comprehension has simply worked its mysterious ways to change things? Well… even if you haven’t quite felt that in some form, I’ve started to feel it now, and hopefully it at least makes sense that I’d feel that way. Something has to make sense throughout all this at least. I remember though, the first day I went back to school after the incident, midsummer night dreams still playing through my head even then at the time as the door leading inside the main building is within reach, and I reach out a hand through the haze. And then I’m stopped again by the same girl with the cheery smile and clover pin that I’d seen before, but this time her smile seems strangely… knowing, and… fanged, like, with these really sharp almost draconic teeth. She pulls me away from the door before I can question that observation, around towards the playground, unoccupied aside from a small group of kids I’d seen around the school in passing. They all seem to give me the same knowing sort of grin that she gave me, sans fangs. Only then do I notice they all have clover pins on their persons.
“We know you saw it too… Don’t worry you’re not crazy, or well, maybe it’s better to say you’re in similarly crazy company, hmm?” a rather short, tomboyish girl with features even more youthful then the rest of us had said in a cheery sort of way. At that, a guy walked up to me, the captain of the swim team of all people, (who I swear I’ve seen with a monkey of all things following him around on occasion) and in his hands there was another clover pin, which he jovially offered to me.
“Think of it as our own little unofficial club,” the fanged girl told me with a wink as I placed the pin against my shirt, feeling strangely choked up. I’d never really been a part of many clubs, not for long at least, let alone any real established group of friends, and suddenly I had both.
Sometimes I still recall my desperate cry to god, and I still feel like a boy, no stronger than those old days, that old version of me… and in those old days he stood blankly, staring at nothingness, no falter in his emotionless trance, that past self, which the new me still sometimes does. A summer smile I won’t remember stays just as obscure as it had been before, and even with all the changes that happened to me, does that change what happened in the past? No, it stays the same forever. Problems won’t just go away when new things happen to you, but y’know, even if I’m sometimes like who I was still, I’m not quite him anymore. In a way, I guess I died on that day in some form. And I’m so sorry that I’m unable to share this all with you… I know, I need to let you go, accept it, but that goodbye’s too sad and I’m still afraid it’ll just make me feel way too lonely… Just yesterday I dreamed of you walking away, into that setting sun. I remember I was screaming to you. “Oh god, no, don’t you say that you’re leaving. Oh no, don’t leave me!” I shouted, and I woke up in tears again… Funny, my robotic eye seems to have perfectly functioning tear ducts too… But eventually, eventually maybe I’ll someday be able to let you go, and know you’re at peace. I have friends to help me with that now, and I finally know those hazy figures I’d seen before weren’t lost people from my past, they were the people I was going to meet someday in the future, and I just didn’t know it yet… I didn’t know they were just looking for this “me” that exists in me somewhere, and maybe now, now that I’ve met them, I’ll be able to find that version of me too.
Entry 2
“You okay?” With a worried kind of wail, I heard someone say to me just as I passed out… I wasn’t awake very long after I tipped my car over, turning too fast along a curb, but I remember how much it hurt for those few moments of consciousness. I had never felt that sort of pain before in my life. I thought I had but I was clearly kidding myself severely. I was happy to let darkness take me so I wouldn’t feel it anymore. I don’t know why I’m even writing in a journal like this now, speaking to no one but a piece of paper, and it goes without saying that things like you, a scrap of paper, wouldn’t ever get me, especially if my fellow humans seem to have trouble understanding me half the time. Speaking of halves for that matter…. I’m “lucky” that my left side took most of the impact. Meant they only had to cut off the weaker arm and leg... I use the term lucky very, very loosely if that wasn’t already clear. Now I’m just lying here, bandaged up, fewer limbs, along with a nearly completely damaged left eye by the way… waiting for the doctors to officially tell me if I’ll pull through any of this. You know those feelings of disappointment so commonly felt among most children and teenagers when things don’t go their way? When you’re around that sort of age range, unless there’s really something more going on there, you act so sad but it’s all just an act in the end. You’re living contently, you have luxuries a lot of people don’t, and you get the chance to feel disappointed over petty stuff. Then you lose the kind of stuff you thought you’d always have… like limbs… like people… suddenly then you actually get a taste of what sadness can really be. Today’s a haze to me, just like the past few days since I first woke up after everything… God knows how long it’s been since then, I’m sure the doctors and nurses have told me but I can barely remember some of the stuff they’ve said since this morning. I’d better become apathetic to this sort of thing soon, there’s no chance in hell I’m going to make it through all of this willingly otherwise. I have you in my thoughts still… not this piece of paper, no, I stopped addressing you a few sentences ago… I mean you… the person I nearly killed myself trying to find in the first place. Maybe it’s just my damaged brain, but, I sometimes think I feel your presence somehow… always in the form of the dry heat I felt that last day we saw each other. I felt it quite a bit the other day… I’ve got no other choice but to keep up the pace I had yesterday ‘cuz that’s the only thing I can do to help myself while I’m lying here bandaged up like a pathetic literal wreck. I don’t want your unique sort of heat to ever leave like the visions I still sometimes have of seeing you again in my sleep. Just visions though… not even dreams, they’re never clear enough to really be dreams… and if I can’t dream, you and me seeing each other again… That I’ll see… see you smile the way I know you did, but I can’t envision it anymore no matter how much I try… well I don't know what to do... But I still imagine I know exactly what it looked like, and that I’ll see it genuinely, and we will be so… happy… as friends, like it was before. Like I understand I’d want it to be at least. Now I see it. I see it, why can’t you be around for me to say it to you? To admit it to your face? If I can’t aspire to do that someday… well… clearly it’s better to just stay in a fantasy land where it’s possible. I’d rather hold on to the past than to let go. I’d get to live out those dreams, and never wake from them or I’ll break, again, from the shaking, violent forces of this damned outside world that tried to reject me by taking you away, by punishing me for trying to deny what was almost certain. The world doesn’t want me to see those happy days anymore, there’s no other answer for it. I tried admitting this to a nurse attending to me earlier, saying I just wanted to have time stop moving from now on, since I could never look out and see the new day the same way I once did, not like this. “But you can’t ever hope to see the daybreak again at all without tomorrow,” she tried to convince me. As if I would care in the slightest. I don’t want to see the daybreak again, it’s ruined for me now, it’s poison. It’s something other people can enjoy but I can’t anymore. With time just running by all these arid days, bringing with them beads of irritating sweat all over me, in so many places that I can’t comfortably reach with my remaining hand. That’s all I get out of these summer days that others are enjoying with each other, laughing, smiling, enjoying each other’s company, and I can tell from the voices I hear outside that this is happening. It’s all taunting, inadvertent, but nonetheless, it still feels like they’re mocking me by enjoying themselves like that. I try to get anyone attending to me to shut the window but they tell me I need some of that fresh air, and I really have to insist for them to finally relent and shut it for at least a moment, so I can tone out the evidence of those very days. It’s so bad that I’d kill just so they’d go away and leave me just a little bit of peace. It’s more than just the days, I don’t want to even see people anymore, let them all leave me be, sulking like this. Yes, I’d rather be all alone.
I’m sorry. Things got a little darker than usual there… as I was writing that I heard the doctor mention I wasn’t likely going to make it through the week. At least, that’s what I heard, and I nearly tore myself off this medical bed at the sound of it. They had to come rushing in and restrain me again, which, obviously wasn’t so difficult for them. So, that’s it then… my life’s coming to an end. Not even 18 years old yet, and kind no longer for that matter… just a hateful husk now. No one’s gonna remember me very fondly I’ll bet, I didn’t do much for that many people. There was her… but I ruined that and she’s not around to care anyway, my folks will be devastated, but, I’ll just be seen as some tragic case of what could have been to them probably in the end. And in these last moments all those medical people working on me will probably see me getting desperate for some miracle in these next few days, because I’m pretty much getting to that point where all I can hope for is to pray for something like that to happen. “Poor bastard, he cried to God earlier but he just can’t get stronger,” they’ll probably say. I’m too tired from the last squabble to try anything though. Right now all I can remember is how much I hate my past self, how much he squandered what he had, reaching out both his hands to hold on to such a pretty smile he can’t take for himself because it’s not his. Now I’m futilely going through these days fighting the constant light of suns flashing through my window, knowing I’m going to literally just waste away in such a small town with nothing but regrets… Oh god why can’t you free me somehow?! I want another chance at all this, let me have it, please! Why do I even bother asking…? The fight’s over, and suddenly every sigh I have tried to breathe in defeat gets caught up in my throat like somewhere deep inside I haven’t given up, there’s a stupid spark of hope in there somehow. I really wish that side of me got smart enough to know I was stopping now with all that.
No… can’t go back to that summer day. It hurts so bad, all of it, inside and out… I’m so damn fragile now, don’t ever touch this fragile bastard or it might break. Let’s face it, I’m already broken as it is. I’m gonna sleep now. Maybe I’ll wake up, maybe I’ll dream finally beforehand, at this point, either would be the luckiest thing to happen to me in ages.
Entry 3
I’m still trying to understand what’s happened. It all changed so quickly, and so unbelievably. I don’t even know why I’m writing this except to help rationalize this past experience as, well… real. Picture this… A voice is calling out to you, something indecipherable at first, but then you start to put together the words… “Can you hear me?” as everything else around you seems to just start disappearing. Then, you just, feel really… tranquil, peaceful, even though, inside, you can feel total and utter chaos brewing within. Then you look up and you see… something both amazing and ridiculous at the same time. A massive bird with a long beak that seems sharper than the finest knife. It looks almost cartoonish, like something out of an anime, and well, that’s probably because it is. It’s a Fearow, a Pokemon of all things… but it’s not simply that, this one’s feathers glimmer a brilliant golden hue, and lightning seems to constantly arc around it. Those who’ve seen it before me would tell me it’s called the Shiny Volt-Tackling Fearow… I’d call them insane if I hadn’t seen it myself on that particular night.
I remember too, how I thought that would be the last time I’d fall asleep, that I wouldn’t wake up the next day, so at first I’d figured this was the stuff of some coma fantasy before my mind shut-off for good, or maybe even the most bizarre and unexpected afterlife… but it was neither. Quite the opposite in fact. As I watched the creature fly down to face me, I heard something echo in my head, something asking me what it was that I desired most to change about myself, and deep down, something nestled within me came out. I replied that I wanted to be myself again, the me that I was before everything came crumbling down on me and turned me into such a hopeless and lifeless husk… but I wanted to be even better than I was, or at least, have to potential to be better, because I didn’t want my flaws to ruin yet another life like it did hers. A flash of the aviary beast’s lightning blinded me for a moment as I made my request, and I was back in my hospital bed… but as I regained consciousness, I felt something unexpected… I felt both of my missing limbs, and I saw them too, with perfect vision… They were back, my eye was fixed, and all the physical pain and agony I’d been suffering through was… just completely gone. I couldn’t explain it, but even stranger, the doctors all seemed to forget that I was gravely injured. All of them simply told me I’d dinged my head and I’d only been in the hospital to make sure I wasn’t concussed. I walked out of the hospital that day… I walked out… on my own… like everything had been a terrible nightmare. For a while I thought it had been, until I took another glance at my restored arm. It felt real, it worked just fine, but, something seemed to be making certain parts of it… glow? It wasn’t just a weird trick of the light. Through some miracle I had a cybernetic left arm and leg now, and all the internal stuff that had been damaged seemed to be replaced with unfathomably futuristic stuff too, which I could tell once I got the hang of my robotic eye. I won’t delve into the details over how and when I exactly found all this out, but… let’s just say when you pull your arm off for the first time and you can still feel it and work it like it’s attached to you… it’s just a teeny bit freaky.
This was to be my second chance at life. Somehow now it’s become clear. You know how sometimes you wonder about stuff that doesn’t make sense and eventually you just think about it a little more and go “ahh, so that’s the reason…” and accept that the details will probably never really be explained, that something beyond your comprehension has simply worked its mysterious ways to change things? Well… even if you haven’t quite felt that in some form, I’ve started to feel it now, and hopefully it at least makes sense that I’d feel that way. Something has to make sense throughout all this at least. I remember though, the first day I went back to school after the incident, midsummer night dreams still playing through my head even then at the time as the door leading inside the main building is within reach, and I reach out a hand through the haze. And then I’m stopped again by the same girl with the cheery smile and clover pin that I’d seen before, but this time her smile seems strangely… knowing, and… fanged, like, with these really sharp almost draconic teeth. She pulls me away from the door before I can question that observation, around towards the playground, unoccupied aside from a small group of kids I’d seen around the school in passing. They all seem to give me the same knowing sort of grin that she gave me, sans fangs. Only then do I notice they all have clover pins on their persons.
“We know you saw it too… Don’t worry you’re not crazy, or well, maybe it’s better to say you’re in similarly crazy company, hmm?” a rather short, tomboyish girl with features even more youthful then the rest of us had said in a cheery sort of way. At that, a guy walked up to me, the captain of the swim team of all people, (who I swear I’ve seen with a monkey of all things following him around on occasion) and in his hands there was another clover pin, which he jovially offered to me.
“Think of it as our own little unofficial club,” the fanged girl told me with a wink as I placed the pin against my shirt, feeling strangely choked up. I’d never really been a part of many clubs, not for long at least, let alone any real established group of friends, and suddenly I had both.
Sometimes I still recall my desperate cry to god, and I still feel like a boy, no stronger than those old days, that old version of me… and in those old days he stood blankly, staring at nothingness, no falter in his emotionless trance, that past self, which the new me still sometimes does. A summer smile I won’t remember stays just as obscure as it had been before, and even with all the changes that happened to me, does that change what happened in the past? No, it stays the same forever. Problems won’t just go away when new things happen to you, but y’know, even if I’m sometimes like who I was still, I’m not quite him anymore. In a way, I guess I died on that day in some form. And I’m so sorry that I’m unable to share this all with you… I know, I need to let you go, accept it, but that goodbye’s too sad and I’m still afraid it’ll just make me feel way too lonely… Just yesterday I dreamed of you walking away, into that setting sun. I remember I was screaming to you. “Oh god, no, don’t you say that you’re leaving. Oh no, don’t leave me!” I shouted, and I woke up in tears again… Funny, my robotic eye seems to have perfectly functioning tear ducts too… But eventually, eventually maybe I’ll someday be able to let you go, and know you’re at peace. I have friends to help me with that now, and I finally know those hazy figures I’d seen before weren’t lost people from my past, they were the people I was going to meet someday in the future, and I just didn’t know it yet… I didn’t know they were just looking for this “me” that exists in me somewhere, and maybe now, now that I’ve met them, I’ll be able to find that version of me too.
