1011. About memories, 1
(Rose)
Days are good. I manage well and Tilke is a good companion.
Nights are a little more painful. Grief lingers still in a way.
I see Beatrice, more than Redmia. She’s alone but driven. I can’t see her face, she has lost her love and moves on steadily ahead.
I want to. I will. But I emotionally keep some of my natural and inherent weaknesses down to this day.
I’m in control when awoken. But when my psyche can be free, when I’m asleep, I’m still struggling not unlike I’ve always been.
I wake up in a gasp again. My cheeks and eyes are wet.
I stand up and go wash myself in the nearby stream, starting with my sorrowful face.
Tilke watches me from afar, in the heights of a tree where she had settled for the night. I must look a little miserable on these awakening times.
But now I’m back to my better self and I can smile.
~
We pack up and start moving along the old road that is broken by a rift and step down every few metres.
T - You dreamt of them again?
R - Well, yes. I think Beatrice’s story currently crystallises my usual melancholia. It’s a rather normal thing for me. I’ve grown used to handling these cycles better and better as I grew older.
T - Are you bipolar?
R - What is that?
Tilke seems a little embarrassed by her own question. From what I’ve told her about me over time, she had an intuition.
T - I forgot you mostly come from an older time. So have you heard of the spectrum of schizophrenia?
I was following her, climbing down the giant steps this ruptured road has become. Tilke jumps down as well. Her body endures it with ease. Proportionally to her height, she can jump down from higher without as much strain.
As for this word... Split mind? Is it a diagnosis of my melancholia and thorns from more modern medicine perspective?
R - No... What does it mean and implies?
Tilke tells me a little more about what she knows, and how she connects the eventuality to me.
As I understand it, it’s about how one’s brain works and struggles sometimes. How emotions can grip the cogs, or be the gripped cogs. How things can go out of control, and it’s not one’s inherent fault. It just is.
Our brain turns chaotic splotches of colours into understandable paintings. And for some people the grammar rules are unfortunately set in a different direction. Some things make sense, others are painful to comprehend and share.
Medicines and good understanding of these hidden mechanisms of the mind can support life and civilised situation, as if it was any other disease we learnt to accommodate.
It’s overall fairly intuitive and acceptable to me, because now I have some knowledge of metabolic parallels to describe thought processes. And I have been taught some fundamentals of brain electrochemistry equilibriums and challenges.
How the different... hypostases, of my brain, correlate their perceptions to create my understood reality, and then my responses to it. I get how things can find slightly uncommon pathways, with benefits at first in trauma for instance, and later drawbacks in other situations or environment. A tale as old as time.
My thorns held me together when I had not found any other way. The child I was built her own pathways, to cope and survive. But they have tweaked some structures of my mind with holes, leaks, where bile and fear can even to this day continue to flow. I wasn’t the most resilient, and I likely had some phenotypic predispositions to change in such ways.
Because I have had enough time and experience to familiarise myself with how I work and function, because I’ve had good educations, I generally now control them, like any other appetites. But apparently, these kind of scars and inherent differences to the psyche could have been diagnosed and easily helped in her time.
R - So you think I’m like that?
T - Possibly to some minor levels. I don’t have the means to rate your levels on every aspect.
R - Well, I’m not hearing voices that don’t feel like my own thought generally. But it’s true I can suffer serious mood shifts. You know, I had chances to encounter progress in all sorts of sciences including medicines over my travels. But you’re the first one I meet with some insight in the matters of the mind. I guess it was only logical for centuries of civilizational and technological advancement to address our mind’s metabolism.
Too bad we didn’t seem to reach global utopia nonetheless.
I guess knowledge of the mind was still a subset of societies stability. When it came to competition for energy, this was an irrelevant pacifist force like any other form of ethics.
If it wasn’t even twisted into mind control by the armies.
Well, it’s all in the past now.
Tilke smiles kindly at me, and I smile back.
It’s actually rather nice. Because just as sharing a common language helps relating and understanding each other; her being versed in thus means she will more easily understand me and my invisible stirrings.
R - Although more than splitting of the mind, I’ve rather come to embrace and merge with many other entities prior.
All the ghosts of my past lives I’ve come to embrace and move on. I’m quite fond of the younger Rose mainly, who looks frail and shy, but whom is really my main past. The golden Blume is more of a sassy advisor, and the others wilder emotions.
I have another confident smile as I try to figure out again the ghostly shade of Nightmare by my side. I try to hallucinate her presence by my side and her voice in my head, but I’m not so far over the positive spectrum that it just happens. It’s hitting my imaginative wall.
R - Just one more...
T - Pervert.
She laughs, insinuating weird things I don’t fully get. I’m confident and clear enough about myself to join her in amusement, more than I would fall from the criticism or tease.
Nights will continue leaving me anxious for a foreseeable future, while I digest everything that marked me and required some catharsis. But overall, I’m quite sure I will be fine.
~
We reach our first ghost city. This one is entirely swallowed by the forests and long decrepit. Walls are piles of fertile mush. I tell more to Tilke about these new historical differences in architectural decay.
She tells me a few other random pieces of knowledge she still has in mind. She however unlike me in my time, hasn’t come with the memories of an identity.
It must have been a traumatic start for her. But now she gets at ease with being Tilke, the imp I found in the cockpit of that older body that my sister had tweaked and thrown.
It’s a peculiar tapestry for her genealogy, but she’s making peace with it.
We venture through the empty streets, though the ground is so uneven and random, it’s a stretch still calling these streets.
We pass between the ruins still standing as if they were abandoned megaliths now, covered with overgrown vegetation.
She gets some herbs and wild vegetables to work onto cooking, using her little knife. She peels and cuts leguminous bulbs that are enormous to her size but will be for us both. I pick up some strong elastic cables and other sturdy materials in this new environment.
At first she wonders what I’m trying to craft. Then it becomes obvious as I make an arrow out of a hard polymer thin pipe for the shafts. I use some peculiar leaves instead of feathers for now, to craft the fletchings.
By the end of the day, I’m about set.
I put a target about thirty steps from me, and adjust what I’ve made.
R - I ought to show you how primeval I can be. Don’t I?
T - You think we will need it?
I nock an arrow and pull.
This does bring back sensations my awareness had forgotten. Not quite memories directly, more sensations through my body.
I adjust my stance. I breathe out and shoot.
The arrow flies and misses the target but pierces through the rusty panel in a sharp noise.
I can work with that.
I adjust my multi-coloured hair into a ponytail. Oh right, she asked me something as I was starting to focus.
I show her some tracks of animals in the mud next to us.
R - We might make use of it yes. Perhaps for hunting another meal, and perhaps to take down a monster too.
I point to the distance and she looks. Beyond these peaceful ruins, there’s a bog and then a river. And beyond there, we see lingering fogs that are typical of more modern toxic cities.
~
