Topic: Time Out of Joint (Glenn's Red Moleskine)

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-07-06 15:56 EST
"'sometimes I write my thoughts down I can never remember who I am Who I am, where I am, what on earth I'm doing here What on earth I know" (Idlewild, "Everyone Says You're So Fragile") July 6, 2012 R.S.C.

Sometimes I think a fresh start's a good thing. I could write in the journal I had for"four years, in terms of time here" But there's a lot of stuff in there that I read and I cringe about. A lot of people I used to know that I don't know anymore and a lot of painful memories that I don't think remembering will help. So yeah, new journal, new view, new life"

And there's a ton of things I feel like I can do with this. Notes on experiments. Trying to look back on stuff that happened in the past, figure out what went wrong and what went right. Poems, I guess. It should be useful to me. I try to read through the old one and I can't figure out how to use it.

Timesickness has been clearing up, and my memory's getting better. I still have moments where I feel myself skip seconds or where a minute passes without me knowing it, but it's not as often. I feel like I can go out in public, and I have, though sometimes I still feel like a ghost. I've fought in the duels a bit, fought in one of the tournaments for newer duelists, didn't make it past my first fight, but it proved one of the spells I was working on to temporarily move normally on my crippled hip works. Also went to the Beltane Masquerade Ball, watched the happy couples, drank some mead.

Les farfadets run my old store on Rue Des Farfadets now, more or less. They get more money, now, I make less stuff, and it's more about importing and selling than about me making stuff. I do make stuff sometimes, but not all that often, and only when I feel like it. I must've done something right, because I had enough money to buy a small one-story farmhouse on the outskirts of town, and I rent out the land behind my house to farmers who can't afford to buy their own land. Nothing harvested yet, but it's looking good so far, and it should be good for us all.

I've heard people call this time of year the 'dog days of summer," and I'm not sure why, except that maybe it's very hot' Don't know what dogs have to do with that. It's hotter than Sygil or Blackbridge summers, but it's not all bad. The sun feels good, sometimes, when you stand outside and just let it soak into your skin. Plants had the right idea.

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-07-09 15:01 EST
"What isn't remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record. You just need to re-write that record." ("Serial Experiments: Lain") July 9, 2012 R.S.C.

Myrrin once told me "Memory is a lie." I think. I can't quite remember. But it sounds like something he might've said, or a point he might've made. Something like "There is no such thing as an absolutely true past' or "History is written by the victors." He'd probably agree with me that it doesn't matter if he said those exact words to me, or some version of those words, or if he even said them at all. I think he did, and it helps me make meaning.

I'm remembering things from the "lost time", but of course, I can never really be sure it's absolutely what happened because we can never really know what absolutely happened. Still, where there were once blank spots in my head when I tried to think about what happened to me, there are memories.

I went to RhyDin at least once, saw Lydia. Tried to talk to her, but I don't remember what I said. I think her ex was there. She seemed sad that I was trapped in amber. And then I disappeared.

Did I see Carley too' I may have, but that is more foggy, and that may mean that I am just pretending that I did.

I see an unfinished basement. Hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches. Screws, nails, fasteners. I don't remember it, but I know I've been there.

I'm standing in a clearing, near a river, near the road that goes to Laur"lotina. I see a pair of elves, one carrying a baby, a couple of miles away from the village. They leave the baby in a basket and keep walking. I think this is when my parents abandoned me, but I can't have been there. That was me in the basket. How can I remember that' I was too young.

I'm talking to Myrrin, at where he calls the "End of Time". He's talking about memory. The nature of time. The nature of timelines, the Garden of Forking Paths, something called quantum mechanics and string theory. I nod, pretend I understand.

I'm at the End of Time, and I just opened a door I'm not supposed to open. I hear Myrrin shouting at me, but he's too late, and he doesn't seem to be trying hard to stop me. I see"timelines. All of them. No, not all of them, because there are infinite ways for time to bend and shift. The most logical ones" I see how I live, how I die. I die young, bleeding to death from a gunshot wound on the floor of an unfamiliar store with an unfamiliar woman with wings cradling my head. I die of old age, many times, surrounded by children, grand-children, my wife. She keeps changing. An elf here, a human there, a half-elf there again. Blond to brown to gray to white hair. So many faces, so many passionate moments I have yet to experience, might never experience. And in all my deaths, in all my lives, I never see Carley. I never see Haleigh. I never see Y"ra.

There's still holes, but they're filling up, and that has to be good, right' It's good to remember, right"

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-07-13 15:47 EST
July 13, 2012 R.S.C.

I don't get mail very often. Letters from my cousins once or twice a year, letters from les farfadets more often, bills, advertisements from Marketplace businesses and politicians, one of the local newspapers " I really should stop that subscription. Especially because I never seem to get it on time, when I actually get it. But I will go days, sometimes a week, without getting mail. So when I heard someone drop something in my mailbox, I got curious. I went out to look at the mailman, but there wasn't anybody out there. That was odd.

Someone dropped a bundle of index cards in my mailbox, wrapped in a rubber band. On one side, there were words written in Common. Hello, Sorry, Goodbye, Stop. Things like that. I brought them inside, took off the rubber band and looked at the back of them. There were words written in some other language on that side. I've been staring at them and staring at them and trying to figure out what the language is, but I don't know.

What I do know is it's my handwriting. I wrote these. I don't remember writing these. I guess"I gotta go to the library and figure out what the language is.

It's really weird.

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-07-16 13:10 EST
July 16, 2012 R.S.C.

The librarian at the public library said the language on the note cards that's not Common is French. From Earth. Or a lot of different earths, I guess, as the case is apparently.

Les farfadets speak French. I'll have to stop by the shop and ask them if they can remember me working on these note cards or talking at all about learning French or anything like that. I know I had these weird fugues for a while after I got back from Sygil, while I was still suffering from timesickness, kind of like the way I would stop in place for brief periods of time while everyone else around me moved, and then I wouldn't notice it. Maybe I spent a night writing up a bunch of notecards and I didn't even know it?

Not sure what it'd be if that's not the case.

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-07-19 11:03 EST
July 19, 2012 R.S.C.

Les farfadets said I never talked to them about French, never spent any time at the shop working on it or anything. They seemed sort of surprised that I was even expressing an interest in it now, when I'd known them for as long as I had and never said anything about it until now. They wanted to know why I was interested in French, but"I don't know that I am.

So they don't know if I had any fugues where I went off on this tangent, and besides, that's really only half of the mystery. It's strange enough that there's stuff written in my handwriting that I don't remember writing, but there's spells that could duplicate my handwriting although I don't know why you'd use them to write flash cards and not to forge checks or legal documents or something. But like I said, that's half the mystery. The other half is"who delivered the cards in the first place" I didn't see anything, only heard them being dropped in the box. I don't know how I can get whoever it was to come back and catch them in the act, but I've put up some basic wards around my property. If someone I don't know comes " and not someone like the mailman or the milkman ? I'm going to know about it, and I'm going to go out and look and see who it is.

I also threw the note cards away, after examining them for magic. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Just black ink on white paper. I don't need to know French. I had a hard enough time learning Draconic, and I don't need to push that out for a language I haven't ever spoken or written. Even if it does seem oddly familiar. No, it's not important to know.

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-07-26 08:56 EST
July 26, 2012 R.S.C.

Someone set off the wards this morning, and I guess they weren't expecting there to be wards around my house, because I got out to chase them down and to figure out who they were, and they ran off. Whatever they were trying to do, I don't think they got done, but they dropped something when they were leaving. If I hadn't been in a rush, and since I had to chase them down while limping with the cane instead of using magic to temporarily heal myself, I might have caught up to them. But whoever they were, they were fast or used magic or knew where to hide around my house, because I couldn't find them at all when I tried to look for them.

They dropped a piece of paper, a slip more than anything, with the following written on it.

August 3, 2012 R.S.C. 10 p.m. Teas"N"Tomes

It's only been in recent days that I can even remember that my birthday is the day after that. So what?s so special about the day before my birthday' And that time" Why then" Why Teas"N"Tomes? I've been there a few times, but that was mostly when I was first here, and it's been years since I've been there.

I guess the only way I'm going to find out is to go. I feel like there's something I'm forgetting, but every time I try to think about it my mind slips over it, the way your eyes slide over someone wearing certain kinds of glamour. If I think too hard on it, I start to get a headache, so I don't. But I really do wish I knew what it was. Would be nice to know if it was something bad like me getting ambushed or killed. But again, the only way I'm going to know is if I go.

Guess I'm going to go.

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-08-06 23:04 EST
August 4, 2012 R.S.C.

She's real. She's actually real. I can't believe that she's actually real.

Imrathion Tathar

Date: 2012-12-02 22:43 EST
November 26, 2012 R.S.C.

She's still real. But that's"I don't know. It doesn't feel like as big of a deal anymore. There's something bigger at work here than finding out something you thought was just your imagination as a child or something is actually a real person.

That's what happens when you meet them and sort of embarrass yourself and yet it doesn't cause you not to talk to each other anymore. Eva " she has a name, not Blue Angel " is a real person. And "we keep, or kept showing up in each others lives, in ways that are"I don't know. Impossible" But obviously, not impossible, since it happened. She was there, as an adult, when I was a kid. And I was there, as an adult, when she was a kid. And we're from different worlds. And when I was timesick, supposedly jumping to places at random, I dropped in on her world more than random should suggest.

So we've been trying to figure out what?s going on. Doing research at Teas"N Tomes, the public library, even some of the academic libraries at some of the universities here. It's been'slow. It's a lot like being back in school again, but less lonely. I haven't really thought about the Sygil days much, but I realize now that I'didn't really handle things well for the last year or so I was there. Or once I left there. Or"let's just say I've been struggling for a while.

And I'm struggling with the research, but it's given me a weird sense of purpose, beyond what I've been doing lately. I'm more in touch with les farfadets, and I'm doing research that feels like it matters. It's one thing to be making yourself a better magician. It's another thing to figure out why in the world your life is the way it is. Maybe it's the first time I'm actually doing something about it.