There was something incredibly awkward about attempting to live a 'real life', when it felt anything but. Everything felt like a play lately, an act in which Orah went through the motions of living to pass the hours until she could go home, take out her pen, and get down to the real business. Being Ida felt more real than being Orah, the strangeness of her fuku wearing off after the first couple of times to become more familiar and comfortable than the mundane clothes in her closet. She still felt strange in the skirts and the lace, but one could only wear the same pair of jeans and sweatshirt so many times before people started to notice.
School was a stumbling block. After a couple of days, she'd gotten a call wondering why she had missed so many classes and Orah had finally remembered that back then, she'd still been going to college. It felt like forever ago... finding her course list had been a challenge, but the memories of that time had surfaced slowly, gotten clearer as she gathered books and homework and shuffled off to class.
She had assumed an easy, if boring, time of it... After all, she remembered going through this already with years on top of that of real world experience in a hospital and then her own medical facility. What she encountered was unnerving and immensely irritating... every fact, every diagram, every note failed to pull the memory of it from her mind. Orah remembered learning this... and yet it was just not there any more. There was a vague sort of familiarity when the answers to the questions were revealed, but the more time she spent in class, the greater the frustration as the breadth of her missing knowledge was revealed. Like someone had stolen all the books out of her mental library and left only a facade of the spines behind...
It seemed everything had been reset to this point in time, from her power level to her actual skill and knowledge. In fact, the only thing she had to show for five years of living were the memories she could still recall as clearly as gazing into a mirror. It made her wonder, sometimes... a nagging little feeling that maybe she really was crazy, or the memories were the dreams everyone, except Chariklo, seemed to think they were. It made this dual life even harder to face with that uncertainty eating at her.
Arian worried about it. She could see it in his eyes every time he looked at her, feel it in the silences that inevitably surfaced between them when there was nothing mundane to talk about. He didn't like how withdrawn she was, but Orah found it incredibly hard to open up to him now. He didn't remember, he didn't know... So while she loved him dearly, she just couldn't accept him with the easy friendship they'd had before. She knew she was pushing people away and that it wasn't helping her mental state, but that stubborn nature Hver had always accused her of would not bend for this. It was a horrible, downward, self-feeding spiral, but there were no hand holds in this pit, no life line to grasp to pull herself free. Chariklo had been one shining point to grasp onto, and it had slowed the downward slide, but the dark mirror senshi could not be with her every hour of the day.
Orah worried what was at the bottom of this ever deepening hole. Her attack on Bischofite felt symptomatic of it, a mark of how far she had fallen. There were times when she felt horrified at herself for what she had done, moments when she surfaced enough to feel some part of her old self again, but they always gave way to the times when she could actually justify it to herself. The horrible part of it was that the reasoning behind it felt sound... He would become a General-King in the future, losing everything she had thought she had loved about him, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people would die at his hands and by his orders. He had made a cape of their bones and stalked the night time streets for more to add to his collection. Was it not justifiable to end him now and save the death and pain he would cause? Yet, Thraen, of all people, had stopped her and stood between the two of them. If Thraen thought it wasn't the proper route to take, it added weight to her old views and made her wonder again at herself and what she had become. Was becoming.
Orah needed to do something... break the cycle, change the future, get her life back, but the how of it, as always, eluded her reaching hands. Everything in her screamed for action, but there was no action to be taken... and there were still classes to attend, homework to do, a family to keep satisfied that moving out had been the right decision. And every day, she felt a little smaller in her own skin, a little harder, a little more frustrated and lost.
I never knew you could drown without a drop of water.
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