It was impossible to forget.

It was impossible to remember.

For days, the dream she had tossed around in her head. Dreams were usually fleeting things, she knew that. Most humans dreamed every night, but by the next morning, they wouldn’t have a chance of remembering them. She had gone on the internet fairly early on to figure out why those vivid hallucinations she had every night seemed to be gone as soon as she attempted to write them down. Neurochemical conditions in the brain during REM sleep was generally given as a reason. Specifically, the lack of norepinephrine, which she didn’t exactly know what that was but she had remembered the word. There was also the fact that humans tended to forget nonessentials, and that was why she also sometimes had trouble remembering silly things she mused on while she was washing her hair or walking from class to class on the Destiny City University campus. Something something needed to activate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex something.

Perhaps that was why she still couldn’t get the dream out of her head, though.

Mulling over thoughts had a way of making them stick, and she was definitely mulling over what she had seen. What her mind had presented to her. What she had written on the piece of paper that she had attached to that tree at that damn carnival.

The visions of what she had seen, exactly, were fading in the way that dreams tended to.

Could she make out that pretty pony anymore? No, not really. She knew, conceptually, that it had to have its mane braided. That was part of the purpose of it being a pretty pony, after all. She knew, conceptually, she had been handed an envelope in the dream, an envelope that had granted her horseback riding lessons with a pretty pony. An envelope that had been handed to her by her so-called parents, the parents her mind wondered if it had hallucinated, the parents her mind wondered if it had actually correctly pictured.

She couldn’t see their faces anymore, but she couldn’t forget that they had been there.

She wanted to see their faces. Delilah wanted to see their faces, their bodies. She wanted to hear their voices crisply, make it out the way she had been able to make out the music when she had put on the expensive headphones. Delilah wanted to have such a clear picture of them that she could find them maybe through some simple research, or even intense research, through the stories of Destiny City. In theory, those that had birthed her had to live around here somewhere, right?

But what if she had made up their faces? What if Delilah had been wrong about their appearances, wrong about their heights, wrong about their face shapes and their intentions and their relationship to her? What if her relationship with them hadn’t been a good one? What if it had? What if it had been exactly like she had seen in her mind? What if it wasn’t? Why couldn’t she recall exactly what she had seen in her mind? Why couldn’t she recall exactly what her parents had looked like in her mind? Why couldn’t she put it all together? Why couldn’t she have a selfie camera for dreams?

The dream was torturing her, and Delilah couldn’t get it to leave her mind.

Her feelings on the dream had been, on some level, compounded by conversations. In particular, already confused about what she had seen, it had almost stabbed her in the heart to hear the news from Sailor Stillwaterite. And there was a large part of her that still didn’t want to believe it. There was a large part of her that hoped what she had been told had not been the truth. Perhaps Nembus and Stillwaterite (and Amazone, too) were simply the results of a particularly bad case of amnesia, something that could, in theory, eventually be cured or worked around. Perhaps Stillwaterite had just been talking out of her a** to explain why she was making a terrible mistake and to try and convince Nembus to join her.

… But that was foolish talk, and she knew it.

Stillwaterite had no reason to lie to her, and she knew it at the time, and she knew it now.

They were both in the same situation, and they would both always be in the same situation. Stillwaterite was one of the few people that understood what it had been like to be without a history. There was nothing else to explain why Still would opt to make such a sudden flip from endorsing making new memories and throwing oneself in whole-heartedly to saying it had all been a trick, that they had their lives taken away, that she was going to go back to where she had come from even if it wouldn’t make her whole again.

And she wasn’t telling Nembus to come with her, but she told her so she would know the truth. So she would know why her memories had been gone. So she would know why those memories were never going to come back.

It was impossible to remember.

It was impossible to forget.

In some ways, the thoughts about what she might have lost were something of a secret obsession, worried over when she laid in bed at night even if she kept them off her radar during the day.

In some ways, they had been an obsession the whole time she felt she had been alive. Had that only been since the summer? What was a conception of time when she didn’t have a conception of a year, yet? She felt lost. She knew she didn’t have the banks of information a lot of people were coming in with. She didn’t have the memory context, either. When her classmates talked about experiences they had as children, Delilah either felt herself become awkwardly silent or, at worst, start making things up. She couldn’t just let herself not fit in. What kind of person would respond to a question of, “So, what was your childhood like?” with a, “I can’t remember”?

But in some ways, it was worse now.

What had been lost? What had been taken from her? What was the life she lived before that she would never be allowed to recall? Who had been taken from her? Who were her friends? Who were her family, really? Were any of them still around her, in some fashion? Had Jade been her friend before? Could she have been her friend if she was so willing to take everything else away from her? Had it been Jade who was behind it? Had she outed herself to Jade at some point, thinking she was protecting her, in the way Still had outed herself to whoever had converted her? Was it someone else? Who else was close enough in her sphere to be responsible?

Had she been more well-adjusted? Had she been a functioning twenty-year-old instead of a seven-month-old baby?

She didn’t know.

She couldn’t know.

All she had was a series of questions with no serious answers.

Questions that swirled around her head like they were swirling around a sink with no actual drain.

It was impossible to forget.

It was impossible to remember.

What could she do with thousands of questions and no answers?

Her first response had always been the internet, one of the handiest tools she had discovered to ever exist. Unfortunately, advice on moving on after amnesia wasn’t exactly common, especially since most people said amnesia was either temporary or nowhere near as permanent as her situation was. Of course. Magic, after all. She had trouble finding any particular advice that would fit well with the definition of betrayal she had been pondering, either, though she did see some references to being a prisoner of war or maybe a hostage that made her somewhat uncomfortable, even as her own brain pointed out that on some level, perhaps being a hostage rang true.

On another level, it didn’t.

She was friends with Jade, her roommate. While she felt out of tune with the people on her team at times, considering she was a senshi and they were all agents with functioning life histories, she didn’t exactly dislike them. They were her team, and most importantly, they were hers. They were a group of people that included her, and really, all Nembus wanted was to be part of a group. She wanted to be respected. She wanted to be a member of a team. She wanted to be with people who cared about her existence and included her in things.

But could she ever be respected by a group she was forced to be a part of? Could she ever be friends with them when she didn’t have the same level of life-experience as they did? Could she ever be fully part of a group that felt like they were all older than her, more well-adjusted than her, more functioning than her? Was that just a form of Stockholm Syndrome? That was another thing she had read about when it came to hostages. Was she just adjusting to a situation she had been forced into?

But she didn’t feel forced into it in the first place.

After all, she couldn’t remember.

She had told Stillwaterite she was going to need some time to think. On some level, Delilah wondered if time to think made it worse. Every time she thought of it, she thought of new problems with her life, new stresses with those around her, new urges of things to do or directions to take, new questions about everything in her environment, new answers that somehow explained everything and explained nothing, new thoughts, and new dreams--

But it had only been a little while.

She said she needed time, but she didn’t know how much time. She didn’t know what time meant, truly. What was a perception of time when the beginning of her time began so recently? How did time progress? What was considered a lot of time? How was she supposed to know? Were twenty years considered a lot of time? What about a decade? Was one year considered a lot of time? Was one minute?

She supposed it might, depending on perspective. She had been aware long enough to realize that one minute itself could go by in a flash, barely perceived. There had been times where she stared at the wall while she was working as a secretary for a few minutes and realized it had actually been an hour. Could an hour be a long time when it could be so easily ignored? And yet, it could feel like a long time on occasion when something was boring. She knew she never wanted to take a class about promotional writing ever again. Who spent their time writing promotions? Why? What was the point?

But even when the time felt like it was dragging, it didn’t allow her to get more done in that period. Thoughts still took the same amount of time no matter if time was going at one mile an hour or sixty. And on top of that, when the time was dragging, she got less accomplished, not more. Time dragging was the result of boredom. Boredom tired her out. Boredom made her want to do something else. Boredom made her want to open up her phone and scroll through social media until she found the next interesting thread. It certainly didn’t make her more productive.

It certainly didn’t make her feel more like she could get through these endless questions that were swimming in her mind. It certainly didn’t make her feel like she could deal with what had happened to her.

She was lost.

What would allow her to find her way out? Would anything bring her the answers?

Perhaps she needed more time.

But would more time be enough?

Delilah had no conception of time, and yet, she hoped it would be.

After all, she couldn’t forget.