Ow. Ow ow ow.
Did someone kick me in the head?
Seem to spend most of my time these days being disorientated for one reason or another. Right now it’s overwhelming brightness and a thumping headache doing the work. At least I got put somewhere comfortable.
I sat up, not really being able to see much beyond the covers and the embarrassing array of pillows propped around me. Sigh.
Great. Laid up in bed. Again. Ain’t that a kick in the head?
Hah, looped it back.
You know, back home the only time I’d ever been in a hospital or stuck in a hospital-like environment of recuperation outside of being a visitor was when I’d been born. Rest of my life one of mundane, peaceful non-injury. I was about the most boo-boo averse person you could hope to meet. Barely even ever had a cold, because my body apparently felt that being ill would have added too much variety to my life.
But here? It’s just one thing after another, I swear. I’d never so much as sprained an ankle back home! Even drunk! Woke up some weird places with some weird bruises but that was about it. I even fell down the stairs once and walked it off. No joke! That’s the point where you start to think someone’s playing silly buggers with you, really. You know-
Hey, wait a minute…
Holy crap! I could remember stuff! Stuff from before!
It had worked!
Ow but did my head hurt though. Only this time it wasn’t because I was trying to think too hard! It just hurt constantly, normally! No peaks and-or troughs. Which was good, I guess? Ow, ow…
“Why couldn’t I have woken up after the pain…” I said, rubbing my temples and screwing my eyes shut. Still very bright. It’s like arriving all over again. Well, almost. If it was like the first time all over again it would mean that-
“Oh! You’re awake!”
That voice! It’s like being waterboarded with sunshine!
Wait, no, that’s a horrible image.
It’s - it’s just nice. Really nice. Roll back the pain, even roll back the memories - let’s start from this point, from hearing that voice.
Feels like the first time, just like the very first time, yeah! Like it never will again!
I was so delighted I even forced my eyes open, to the displeasure of all of me, which objected to both the effort required to lift my eyelids and also - mainly - to the intense, unnecessary brightness.
And in the middle of all that sunshine flooding in stood…
Horse.
Horse. Smiling horse. Talking horse. That’s weird. It’s also perfectly normal. I mean it’s Celestia, isn’t it? You love Celestia, remember? And I do remember. But I can also remember the fact that, you know, horses are not typically that colourful, do not have wings and should not talk. Or smile like that. Or at all! Both of these states of knowing exist between my ears at once and I can practically hear them grinding together. Pretty horse. Pretty horse?
Ack. Dissonance! That feels uncomfortable. Or is that just the headache?
Maybe I have a headache because of the dissonance! Or because having a decade or two or more of life experience unleashed on your consciousness all at once is an uncomfortable thing to happen?
You know what, fuck it. I’m not going to find out right now. I’m just going to shut my eyes again.
Ah. That’s better. Or at least less bright.,
“Are you feeling alright?” I hear Celestia ask, all gentle concern and again comes that screeching, mangling car-wreck that is my present understanding that I love this lady to pieces being dragged down by all of my previous life experience which is playing catch up and is very, very confused.
I did the only thing I felt I could do in the circumstances, which was to smile wincingly and give a thumbs up in her general direction. All-purpose solution for any and all states of being, up to and including being on fire, were it required.
“Feels like I’ve been putting nails in with my forehead. Other than that...okay…”
I said this cautiously, as though drawing attention to it might cause problems. It did not, thankfully. Everything still seemed to be working properly. Brain still chugging along, nothing leaping out of my grey matter to scream at me. Just pain. Not even exciting pain! Just pain.
The bed shifted. That’d be Celestia climbing onto it. I shuffle a little to one side - more pain right across and throughout my head, but at this point what did it matter - and put an arm out. I feel her fit herself into the space this creates and all at once things seem just that tiny bit improved.
How she always so warm, huh? Guess it’s a sun thing. Maybe?
“Did it work?” She asks.
I swallow, nod, head swims. A pause.
“Do you...feel different?” She then asks, plainly on tenterhooks as to the answer.
Good question, too. I thought about it a second, then:
“So far...no?”
Her turn to swallow then. I heard her. Helped she was so close to me.
“Do you still…”
She trailed off and did not finish the question, which confused me. What on earth could she be asking? Only the bloody obvious! How did I not get it right away?
Blame that on the thumping headache. I wasn’t at my sharpest which, given I was already, the children’s plastic knife of the intellectual cutlery drawer, was saying something.
“Still? Still wha - oh! Right. Of course! Of course! Always! Come here, uh,” I said, trying to move in a for a kiss only to find nothing there but air. Still holding her though, still had an arm around her. Figure that one out. “Where’s your - are you actively avoiding me, woman? Keep still!”
“You could just open your eyes,” she said from somewhere I tried to move to only to find her having left it immediately. I frowned and did not open my eyes.
“It’s bright! I feel like I’m being used as a jar to store hangovers for the lean times. Sympathy would be nice!” I said, twisting about to try and get a better position only to find her weight on my arm pinning me. Cunning.
I got a pat on my head, too. So much for sympathy.
“Poor thing,” she said.
“You’re still not holding still!”
Seriously, how can you be holding someone and they still be able to duck and weave like this? I think she was cheating! And that she was giggling throughout was just rubbing it in!
“You’ll appreciate it more if you work for it,” she said, in between the giggles.
“Grr. That’s it. You’ve pushed me too far now.”
Headache be damned!
Pushing up I reached over, put my other arm around her. If she guessed what was coming she said nothing, but she did squeak when I heaved her over and onto my lap. Celestia’s a big girl, don’t get me wrong - kinda...like that, actually… - but I’m a big lad, too, and even with a splitting pain right through my skull I can still demonstrate this. Hah!
“No escape now,” I said once I had her in place and well-trapped.
“Oh no!” She said.
Smooching followed. And she was right, too. I did appreciate it more, having worked for it.
Clever girl...
And that answered that question. Did still love her. A whole lot, in fact. Something felt as much as known, to come across as a dripping pansy. True though. In my head I was aware of it, and in being aware of it something in my chest just seemed to glow.
That wasn’t so bad…
What a nancy though. Glow indeed. Pffbt.
And thinking about that, and how worried I’d been that remembering would ruin it, and how remembering had not ruined anything and how easily it had been dealt with - thinking about all that gave me pause. And as is customary during my pauses I realised that I was at fault.
God! What an idiot! What the hell had I been worrying about?
So much strife! Worry! I even ranted and got shirty at Twilight over this! Twilight! Lovely girl, Twilight. And over what? Nothing! Fucking nothing! Idiot! Should have done this ages ago!
Well, strictly speaking I suppose I had to wait until I was nabbed by a supremely powerful evil queen lady with abundant mind-mucking-about-with experience who didn’t mind running the risk of killing me by fiddling about inside my head - a risk that everyone else at the time felt was too great a risk to run, preferring me alive and magically amnesiac to dead but able to remember the street I lived on and what a Gregg’s was.
But that had happened. And I guess in my defence at the time I had no way of knowing it was going to work out this way. So maybe my concerns were legit? Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, after all.
Uh...
What was my point again?
Uh...fuck.
God my head hurts. The hangover comparison was apt - apt I say! Feels like someone put me in a tin and shook me around, too, just to make sure I wasn’t pretending to be hungover. Urgh.
“Can you remember your name?” Celestia asks and I risk cracking an eye again to look up at her. Pretty horse. Talking horse. Weird, but getting less weird.
Good question, too. Again. She’s full of ‘em today.
Trying to remember one’s name - unless something terrible has happened - is not something that requires a lot of effort or digging. Or any at all, in fact. It’s just there. Part of your fabric.
I had, however, not been thinking about it until she asked me and so when she did it popped right out. Or, rather, I simply noticed something that had been there the whole time since I’d woken up. And it was there. And almost at once I started sniggering to myself. Because the answer to this question was hilarious, at least to me.
“It’s John,” I said, adminst the sniggering.
My one open eye let me get a real good view of her very not-impressed expression.
“I’m being serious,” she said.
Sniggering now upgrades to outright laughter as the sheer ridiculousness of it hits me.
“No, honestly, my name is actually John. John Baxter. Ha! Haha! Oh that’s good.”
“Really?” She asks, still not wholly sure whether I’m pulling her leg or not.
Honestly, I wasn’t.
“Really!”
Outright laughter becomes infectious, and spreads from me to her. I laughed, she laughed, she collapsed onto me and I put my arms around her and we just laughed. To think - I’d been walking about with my real name all along! And I’d got it by accident!
For reasons at the time agreeably, but still. There had been a logic in my choice back then. And a pony with rainbow hair eyeballing me and putting me on the spot. But still! What are the odds, eh? John all the way down.
Fancy that.
Laughter does taper off eventually and Celestia leans off me again, though my arms stay around her. She’s smiling. I probably am, too.
“That’s the dumbest thing that’s happened to me! Oh man! Oh! Couldn’t make that up. Amazing. Sublime,” I said.
“I did always think you looked like a John,” Celestia said to me. It got another laugh from both of us. Good line, I thought. Me, the man with the most sensible name in this world, and therefore the least sensible.
God my head hurts.
I felt something and squinted down, finding her drawing circles on my chest with her hoof. She wasn’t wearing the bling, I noticed. Not even the crown!
“Do you remember…” she said, giggling a little at her choice of words. Amusing in the circumstances, no? “Do you remember, very soon after we first met, I asked you to tell me something mundane? About where you were from?”
I squinted.
“That does ring a bell,” I said.
“Now that you - now that it’s worked - could you do that again? Please?”
I had to smile. She was being so delicate, and yet her fierce need to hear something absolutely dull about back home was obvious. Odd girl, my girl, but I do rather like her.
“Oh, since you asked nicely. I’ll try and remember a normal day for you, strange thing that you are. Let’s see…” I picked a Thursday. Just some Thursday. It went from there.
You cannot imagine the tedium I unloaded on the poor woman but she took it all with good grace. Hell, she took it all with every appearance of eagerness. She kept on asking me questions and leading me on meandering tangents about the most trivial of everyday things. Like buying lunch. Or getting around. Or what I’d normally do after getting home. The most boring shit! But she wanted to hear about it. And this time I could actually tell her. In detail.
Excruciating detail.
By the time I wrapped up the retelling of that Thursday I’d bored myself halfway to tears but Celestia looked as though I’d only whetted her appetite. She was practically bouncing in place. The place in question here being my lap. Ooh-er, I say, etcetera.
“What about your family?” She asked, beaming ear to ear.
And, as with the name, I didn’t have to think about this, didn’t have to dig around. The information wasn’t hidden or buried, it was right there, pointed out and highlighted by the attention of her question. Boom. There. Alongside all my opinions and feelings on it.
“Not got a whole lot of one, I’m afraid. Mum died, died years ago, when I was a little babby. Eight, or near enough. So it goes. But that’s fine. Happens to the best of us, right? Then it was just me and dad and that was, well, that was fine. I turned out alright. He did alright.”
I said this and I say this, and though I know it might sound sad to her it is not sad to me, not anymore, because it happened a long time ago and I have got over it by now.
Kind odd to consider though, isn’t it? I did not know this stuff yesterday, and yet I have also known it for years, and my feelings on the matter crystalised a long time ago, so while I am learning it I am also not, and this was always there and there is nothing new to be learnt.
Christ, no wonder my head hurts.
From the look on Celestia’s face she clearly felt that her run of good luck with asking me questions had run out. The beaming from ear to ear had certainly stopped.
“And he’s...not dead? Your father?” She asked, wary, clearly expecting the worst.
“Heh, no. Very much alive. Least he was when I left. Married an American. Susie. Perfectly lovely woman. Moved over with her couple years back. She went to look after her mum, actually. Lot of that going around, apparently, though hers is still kicking about as far as I know. Dad went with her, got a job. Lives there now. Ain’t seen either of them since, really. Keep making plans for it, you know? Christmas visit or something. But it just hasn’t happened. Life.”
Going to America wasn’t exactly something you could do on a whim, or at least not something I could do on a whim, and the tempo of expenses always just set such a trip on the very edge of ‘next year’ and had done so for, well, ever since he had gone over there. Eh. One of those things.
“He moved away?” She asked.
I suppose I hadn’t been especially clear about the geography involved. There followed me giving a whistlestop explanation of Earth’s layout, such as was my ability to explain it. I got across the salient points for this situation at least - big ocean, many miles of distance, separated by a common language and all that.
Stopped short of pointing out how they were all rebel scum. She probably wouldn’t get the joke and that would just lead to further explanations and, really, my head was hurting enough already.
Celestia looked unhappy once I’d finished doing my little hamfisted bit of exposition.
“He just left you on your own?” She asked, framing the question like an accusation for someone who wasn’t there.
Again, I feel this was my fault for perhaps not setting things out clearly. But then again I am coming at the whole thing as someone who came to terms with it all years ago and in context, too. We’re all looking at the same things, seeing different things...
“It wasn’t like it happened five minutes after mum died. I wasn’t a babby anymore, had moved out anyway. Besides, he’s a grown man, he can do what he likes,” I said, shrugging.
Honestly, not the way I’d seen this conversation going. Remember when we were smooching? That was much better than this.
“I thought you would have been more unhappy about it, is all,” she said. Again I shrugged. Not sure what she wanted from me here.
“We have a perfectly healthy relationship. We’re aware that we both exist, we’re on friendly terms and we’re both perfectly happy individuals. I’m not sure what else we might be expected to do.”
Celestia was quiet a moment or two as she reflected on this, looking away from me.
“What about when he finds out you’re gone?”
That was a good question. She was back on form.
I mean, I was the sort of person living the sort of life who could (and had) just drop off the face of the Earth without making that much of a fuss about it. The people at work would notice first, no doubt, and they’d be annoyed about it. Then they might be confused. And maybe if I was lucky they might get worried about it.
Following that - in the imaginary sequence of events playing out in my head - there might be a grainy, very bad picture of me appearing on the news. John Baxter, last seen doing something stupid, probably, have you spotted this man? Call this number, etcetera. Would it make the national news? Probably not. But maybe. You never know.
And then one way or another dad would find out. He might hear the news, or someone who knows him might hear the news and call him, or else they might call him direct. The police, maybe, to inform him.
Then what?
“Shit…” I said.
I might not have had the most Dance With My Father relationship with my dad but I still liked the motherfucker (heh), you know? And now all I could think about was him, other side of the planet, worrying himself halfway to death because his son - who he was kind of fond of, I guess - had just up and disappeared.
Christ on a bike he hadn’t come back, had he? Wasn’t going around sticking up flyers on telephone poles and lampposts? Going up to people with my picture, asking if they’d seen me? Trying to track down my friends to ask if they had any idea only to find out I hadn’t got any? Experiencing then a kind of mingled despair at the social failure his song was, crossed with continuing desperation at being unable to find me?
“Shit,” I said again, screwing my eyes shut some more and covering my face with my hands the better to shut out that bloody sunshine. “If it’s not one thing it’s another…”
Fuck me my head hurt though.
“John?” I heard Celestia ask, concerned, and I kept one hand on my face while groping for her with the other, found her, and gave her a pat.
“I’m fine. Just - not how I saw my day going. Let’s put a pin in this, alright? At least until I can move without my head spinning.”
She didn’t say anything to this but the hug I got kind of suggested agreement, and was much welcomed anyway. My arms went back around her and I just pressed my face into her side and did my best to ignore the whole rest of my life that had just been shunted into coupling with my whole awareness.
What a mindfuck! Literally? Thanks Umbra, I guess.
Distantly there was a creaking sound and in that way that came with having one’s eyes closed my double-duty pulling ears recognised it as a door.
“Hello?” Came Twilight’s voice. “How is - he’s awake! Oh! Uh, I’ll - I’ll come back.”
I might have been halfway buried in Celestia - and not like that, thankfully, that would have been so much worse or at least so much harder to shrug off, ahem - but I could still picture Twilight entering, cautious, seeing if I was alright, spotting me up, being unaccountably excited, then clocking that me and Celestia were snuggling and suddenly feeling awkward about having intruded.
I could see that all in my head.
“No, no, you come here, you, more hugs. In fact just smother me, sit on my face or something,” I said, sticking an arm out in the direction I knew the door was in and making a ‘come here’ gesture with my hand.
Well that came out wrong.
No-one said anything.
“Uh…” Twilight went. Celestia was very clearly trying to keep in another giggle.
I didn’t even bother to defend myself.