It’s not like I was… No, that sucks. Let me start over.
Life is hard when you don’t know what you’re good at. However, I considered myself good at a lot of things in life, such as breaking bones, dying like that time at birth, and generally being nice. Cordial, one might say if they were trying to sound fancy. I’m also good at making lists and shrugging things off. Point being that I… Uh…
Maaan, why are journals so hard? Not good at this shit either, apparently. Sad, but not surprising. Being direct is key when you’re trying to get a point across (Or something like that. Rhetoric 101 was often skipped.), so let me just spit it out instead of candy-coating it: I’ve got bad luck, my skills in general suck and I don’t have a third word that isn’t the F-word, so…
How many times am I gonna have to start over?
Journal in Three… Two… Wait, what if I try talking to you? Hm… I dub thee Journal, also known as J-Man, Je’Amournal, and ‘Booksy’. I like Booksy, personally. Let’s give this another go if you don’t mind…? Silence means you don’t care, I think. Carrying on now.
From literally my earliest age I've had some pretty bad luck. Mom never quit smoking when she was pregnant with me, so I was born pretty early and was a quite bit under average weight and size in general. To make things more apt for what would come later, I was born with a caul covering my face that suffocated me during birth. One could say that my biggest stroke of luck was being revived and getting to live a pretty full life, but another could also laugh and ask if the other was a prick. I personally considered it a good thing because I eventually learned to laugh everything off if I wasn’t close to dying. I mean, if baby me could ‘chill out for years’ according to my parents, after dying, then a few broken bones and fractured toes here and there wouldn’t be the end of the world. Not to say I was smiling while swearing my head off each of the thirty-six times I’ve broken something, or the fifty-one times I fractured something or other out of pure clumsiness.
Yes, while you’re thinking it, my insurance company dropped me a few weeks before the Big Wang Event Something in the universe aligned then to screw me over, but it’s not like I was terribly bitter about it. Life was rough and that was okay, which was something even my parents didn’t get. It’s like everyone thinks that just you have bad luck you have to be super depressed all the time, but honestly, I just learned to take pleasure in the little things. People asked me all the time how I wasn’t chronically depressed or terrified of the world around me and I just had to chuckle at the way they phrased some of the myriads of questions. It’s like some people just haven’t heard of a sunny disposition or something. I just didn’t let much get to me in the long run. The short term? Less success in that field. Yeah, I’d already had surgery on my shoulder and leg before I hit high school because of being clumsy, but I healed up and got back to tip-top-ship-shape for a pretty good while. The thing was to just let the water flow under the bridge and get over it because what could I really do about it? I’d tried being generally more careful, but I spent half my time in my head, just thinking of impossible things that made me smile. Writing it down, I think the cause was the cure in that particular scenario.
I’m sure you get it by now, Journal, that I don’t mind life-sucking. I thrive in suck. I’d make an analogy, but my mind’s in the stable and I’m not referencing hay, so I’ll say I do best in the muck. Losing all my teeth to getting beamed in the mouth with a baseball was… Well, I kinda let that one get to me along with the ‘Gum Gum Gauner’ thing, but like everything else, there’ll be a time to laugh at that too. Right now is a time to reflect, so I guess I’m just trying to explain to you (J-Man) and myself why I jumped off that bridge, and it wasn’t because I had dentures at eighteen. I mean, I get sad. Who in the world doesn’t? Looking back on it, I can’t really laugh because I can’t take it back and I really don’t understand the frame of mind I was in when I did it, but… Well...
To explain, I’d bounced from job to job after getting my G.E.D, working just about every menial labor position in ‘Frisco before landing a decent job as an accountant. Apparently, I actually was good at keeping numbers in my head, so I didn’t do poorly with most tasks presented to me. My boss was willing to work with my weak points and most of my coworkers were friendly, if not a little chilly whenever I messed something up. The commute to work was hell and getting home was no better, but I loved where I lived and I enjoyed being there with the love of my life, Rachel Kivette. Raven-haired, stormy-gray eyes and a figure to match her attitude; I’d never thought I’d actually land a girlfriend, let alone one that actually enjoyed being around me and understood what I really meant to say. There’s not a lying bone in my body, so I can’t say it was all milk and honey with Raven and I, but I thought the more you suffered the more you showed really cared. I took some solid whoopings from Raven because I thought it would keep her around. Let her say whatever she wanted to me in private while keeping up appearances in public. Right before she divorced with me for something(s) or other(s) (Shows how much I actually cared, I guess.), she did sleep with one of my friends, so Self Esteem was on repeat while I trekked my way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
In retrospect, I just don’t see why it got to me that badly. I mean, if my wife was abusive, why would it be above her to cheat? I honestly should’ve expected it, but I never thought I would overreact so hard! Like geez, when would I ever get that irration- Wait. Yeah, having my wife divorce me for a trusted friend after putting up with her crap for a year? Doing everything she told me to and still getting screwed out of everything I had? Life in general not really giving me a handout that I’d ever noticed as it did with other, worse people? I’m kinda starting to see it, but still. Wouldn’t most people go see a psychiatrist or something instead of just going straight to ‘Hmm… The suislide seems like a fun ride!’? I skipped through the part where I walked to the bridge because I barely remember it at the moment. Everything felt like a dream, but it wasn’t quite the same vibe. Everything felt heavy and immovable during the walk to the bridge, though I do remember that it was a very musical, very reflective journey. I basically let everything that had ever happened to me cloud my mind; fuck up after fuck up just wouldn’t get out of my head. It was like I was watching a lowlight reel of my life where every little mistake was given its own little showcase, and that was just brutal. I got by pretty well by just not thinking about my bad luck, but then again, I think that ignoring my problems for so long may have been what pushed me off that bridge in the first place
Getting up on the side and past the fence took a little doing, but once I’d gotten past everyone who was trying to stop me and set myself to jump, I started having second thoughts. They didn’t convince me not to jump. The fall was… Well, that didn’t feel like a dream. The red paint of the Golden Gate Bridge was clear in my mind, so glaringly distracting to my eyes that I actually slipped when I jumped and ended up plummeting toward the water below back-first with no way to flip myself. Staring at the bridge as I fell was beyond real: easily one of the most lucid moments of my life. Being weightless during the application of gravity to my doom was another thing that I remembered, but it wasn’t as if the sensation of flying was unwelcome. The experience was calming in its own mildly worrying way’, with resignation and acceptance taking over the panic in my heart as the wind buffeted my ears. There was nothing holding me up anymore.. Not Rachel, not myself, not my parents, and officially not the world. For once in my life, I was completely and utterly on my own. The dark, cloudless night above me with a beautiful landmark hovering below the starless sky held the life that I was rapidly falling away from. For some odd reason, I thought that the distance between me and the bridge was like distancing myself from the pain I’d felt, but when I landed, it wasn’t on the water so much as far, far beneath it.
I fell like a gold needle into the river, sinking beneath the waves without a splash or any pomp or circumstance. It wasn’t as though I couldn’t breathe under the water, which in and of itself was weird. No, as I fell deeper and deeper into the icy darkness, I contemplated my life and wondered where I could have gone right. Considered what I could have done to make Rachel love me. Postulated upon how the fuck exactly I’d gotten my G.E.D and why I went to community college shortly thereafter. I didn’t feel like there were any better choices I could have made most of the time since I was just trying to do the best I could anyway, convinced myself that Rachel never actually loved me in the first place, and figured I probably went to college to make myself less worthless. I didn’t succeed with the last one, apparently, but at least I learned some nice, pretty words to describe my feelings.
Sinking further and further beneath the water eventually brought me a kind of warmth that I’d last felt when my Mom was still in her right mind, even if I didn’t really feel it in the moment. I was always close to my parents throughout my life, even when I moved from Oregon down to Cali for work and wanderlust. Alzheimer’s got Mom pretty bad, so memories of her from when she would still hug me and kiss my cheek without that look on her face like she was meeting someone she liked for the first time… It was nice. It was more than just nice to think of the times when Mom and Dad would play with me when I was young, or when the old man would cut time out of his schedule to just spend a few more hours with me. Memories that I actually wanted kept surfacing the deeper I fell into the river, including the morning I’d woken up to accepting that I was bisexual, the day I found Rachel, my wedding day, graduating with my G.E.D, and a few other things that made the coldness of the water fade into a warm, loving feeling. The bittersweetness of it filled me with so much regret that I thought my heart was about to rip itself out of my chest so it could ‘beat’ my face until it was a bloody, mostly undamaged mess. I say the last part because hearts aren’t exactly made out of bone, but that’s not the point. The thing is that I was riding one helluva emotional roller-coaster and the twists and turns had just finally slowed down when I hit the riverbed.
I lay in place, the silence of the situation rained down through the river to impact my inner being. My newfound loneliness resonating in my flesh, eating away at the blood in my veins until the warmth faded into a different kind of cold. In my place, I couldn’t move, could hardly think straight, and still breathed easily without issue, so I considered myself a little lucky and a lottle sad. After all, I’d evidently screwed up my first suicide attempt and was apparently alive for some good old-fashioned spaghetti-regretti, or whatever it is that Rachel’s little brother used to say. My palms weren’t sweaty, I couldn’t feel my knees or arms in all honesty, and Mom hated Italian, so it was more like ‘Body’s numb, eyes weak, thoughts are dumb. Chicken in the wok, spillin’ muh yum-yum’ than Lose Yourself.
Before the self-pity could set it, I got a grip on myself in a way that didn’t make much sense to me and I started laughing underwater, no bubbles coming up from my raucous, joyous guffawing. I found it hilarious that I was still alive after jumping off of the nicest bridge in the West, and it was also funny that I’d escaped from harm nearly unscathed. Things had gone a little pear-shaped, yes, but I would be willing to call life downright callipygean since I was now a merman. I giggled about that little tidbit until I felt the riverbed under my back, as gross as it felt, start giving way as if an ambush predator had forgotten to eat me as I’d drifted down to it’s hiding spot. I hoped that dying for real this time wouldn’t hurt, and I wasn’t terribly worried about living my life all over again since I’d already done it, but lo’ and behold, t’was time for yet another re-examination of the Life and Times of Gum Gum Gauner.
The new recollection of my life went over the good and bad things I did, whether I did the crap with purpose or if I did it by way of an accident; every little endeavor was laid bare to me and I saw so many mistakes. It wasn’t as if I’d ever gone out to cause someone harm because that just wasn’t in my nature, and apparently, I was rewarded for it since I didn’t have to go over and relive the times I’d broken something. However, I did have to go through each and every little time my good intentions had laid another shattered glass block on the road to Hell. Seriously, after every memory it was like I was laying a brick into a path, each event making the new journey either more painful or just another step in the road. It took me a good long while to realize that there really weren’t any points where I had gotten explosively or terribly angry at all, which struck me as odd.
It also got noticed by the guy who was sitting next to me at the bottom of the Golden Gate Strait, but he waited until the end to say anything which was very polite of him if I may say so myself. Once I was done reviewing my life again, the guy asked, “You seem pretty relaxed. Laid-back, I guess..l. So does everything you do turn to shit, or is it just the stuff you try to do well?”
I thought a little irritably at him since I couldn’t speak underwater. ‘Geez, who is this guy? You’d think he’d be a little nicer to someone who just killed themselves.’
Apparently, he heard my thoughts because the English penis laughed. “You overreacted and jumped off a bridge. Thousands of people do it every day, mate.”
‘Instead of laughing, why don’t you tell me why I’m not dead?’ I thought at him some more, trying to match the voice in my head to his.
I couldn't’ see anything in the inky darkness, but I could practically feel his annoyance just like I could feel his arrival in the first place. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll get to that in a sec. I just wanna ask; How have you not done this sooner? I mean, you mortal chavs are all about killing yourselves over dumb shit and you’ve done a lot of dumb shit. What’s the deal?”
‘Well it’s not like we all just up and kill ourselves, man.’
“That’s a fair point, but why did you do it?”
‘Because I was hurt and dumb…’
“So you made a mistake?”
‘Add it to the list, my guy.’
“Want another chance?” he asked casually as if he were offering me a beer.
‘... Yeah, but no at the same time. I just know I’m going to fuck everything up again, man.’
“Take the risk and figure it out, mate. You’ve got a decent head on your shoulders for trauma and weirdness. I mean, you’re taking this whole thing better than most.”
‘You mean dying but not being dead?’
“Yeah, basically.”
‘Ah. Thanks, guy.’
“I just said the truth.” I felt the water shift and start to warm up, the sinking feeling intensifying as he spoke. ‘Are you really not curious about this whole thing?”
‘I really am though. Mind telling me what’s going on?’
“You were born with one luck.”
‘
‘The bad kind?’
“No, mate, not one type of luck, I mean one lucky break. Getting revived at birth ate up all your lifetime luck, Gauner.”
‘That… That really sucks.’
“So did your life, but you still spent a lot of your time being like, reasonably happy, right?”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
‘That’s a fair point. So what’s going on now? I’m pretty sure you’re not here to see the sights,’ I answered interestedly. The baritone of the fellow’s voice was pleasant to hear, and I liked the English accent anyway, so continuing the conversation seemed like a good thing to do for the time being. I also just like hearing people talk sometimes. Sue me, Booksy.
“What’s going on now is that you’re going to pick a skill, an art, and a book you’ve read. I’ll give you all three, plus a little present for being so cool about all this since not many of you carbonated lifeforms or whatever don’t freak about not drowning. Seriously, you haven’t even cried or begged for release or anything!”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. ‘Man, I didn’t wanna die in the first place. Not really. I don’t mind being dead, but it sounds like you’re about to give me another go at things.’
“You sound excited,” he chuckled.
‘Am I going to be skilled at my skill and artful with my art?’
“Yeah, I suppose. Why do you ask?”
‘... It sounds really lame to say, but I can’t actually name something I can do very well. I don’t have any skills, can’t do the art, and I’m only good at healing. Hell, the only reason I still had my job before my wang dragged me off the bridge-’
“Shut up!” He chuckled.
“Anyway, I’m not that good at my job either. I just suck at everything in varying degress, honestly.”
“Oh. Right. Luckless.”
‘That’d be a good nickname-’ I started sinking faster and further. ‘HEY! Help!’
I felt a hand on my chest that pushed me down deeper into the mucky bottom. “Relax and let me speed this up for you. I’d just let it go as it usually does, but I’m really starting to like you, mate. You’re cool as the bottom of a river.”
I couldn’t flounder and since it was supposed to be happening, I killed my panic and thought, ‘Oh. Well, if this is how it’s supposed to be, then you could’ve said something.’
“Yeah, I do this a lot so it kinda gets old, y’know? Warn people and they panic. Don’t warn people and they panic. It’s just old, mate.”
‘Well, I was trying to get old, but then I died to life.’’
“Ha! Good one, Lucky.”
‘Thanks, Pippington.’
“I know you did not just call me ‘Pippington’!” He laughed loudly.
‘You’ve got a nick for me, why not have one for you?’
“Point Lucky. Speaking of points, what do you want to be-”
‘Music! I wanna be good at making music!’
“... You wanna be a musician?”
‘I want to be a good musician.’
“... I guess I could search through my files and check out some of the instrument folders, but that’s more of an art than a skill.”
‘What about being skilled with the gift of gab? Music for the art and charisma for the skill?’ Like I said, hearing people talk was something I enjoyed, and if you could convince someone to chat, then that was just as good.
“Damn, you understand this a lot better than most people.”
‘It feels like the set-up to an Isekai mango, to be honest with you.’
“I can’t pretend like I know what that is, but if it speeds up the process then by all means.”
‘Anything to make someone else’s life easier, my man. Is there anything else?’ I was beneath the muddy surface of the riverbed at this point, coated in slime and grime.
“Book?”
‘Uh… Gone With the Wind?’
“... Seriously?”
‘Well, what do you recommend?’
“Nothing. It’s not really my place to tell you what to read, but whatevs. You’ll get your book eventually. So you want to be charismatic, play some music and stuff, and read Gone With the Wind?”
‘Yeah, I guess.’
“And I still need to find a super-power for you, so I’ll get on that. It might take a couple of days, and you probably won’t remember much of this conversation anyway but it’s been nice talking to you, Lucky.”
‘Fucker, did you just say super-power and gloss over it?’
“Toodle-oo, Lucky-doo.”
‘What?’ I thought, the darkness giving me no indication as to what he was doing.
I had been coated in the muck before, but now I was covered in filth and confused. That didn’t even begin to approach the fact that it felt like all the metal in my body was being microwaved with snaps, cracks, and pops of pain surfacing every now and again, making me more than just a little uncomfortable. It wasn’t debilitating, but it did make me wish I had some Advil on hand to swallow my aches away. However, they stopped altogether as quickly as they started, lingering aches being a thing of the past as I felt myself start rising from the silt. It was gross; kinda like being born all over again, but colder and muddier. I don’t exactly
remember being born, but you get the idea, right Journal? Anyway, Once I cleared the silt I felt that I could move again, so I popped all of my super-stiff joints underwater and looked around. I couldn’t see anything, so I filled my lungs with air (Somehow) and let myself get righted so I could start floating back toward the surface of the strait. However, after about twenty seconds, I realized that my lungs hurt and I couldn’t breathe underwater anymore, making me panic and start clawing my way to the surface. Stroke after stroke carried me closer to my goal, my lungs screaming for less watery oxygen. The river lightened the further I went, the harder I pushed myself, but swimming had never been my strong suit after I’d broken both legs. In the panic I dealt with while I was struggling to get to the surface, I expended everything I had. There weren’t any real thoughts going through my head other than ‘Breathe!!!’ and a slew of swear words so creative I forget how that particular, newly christened song went, but the last thing that went through my mind as I fought my way to the surface was ‘Fuck... I’m not gonna make it.’
I passed out before I ever did, which lead me to drowning. Drowning was not fun.
Having died twice in the past three hours made me feel like a jackass beyond all donkey butts, so imagine my surprise (And annoyance) when I spat up lungfuls of water and threw up silt after being revived. Again. The grass beneath me was slick, soaked with the water that was still sluicing off of my clothes in rivulets, dripping out of my hair as I tried to get the taste of river dirt out of my mouth. With my luck, I figured that I’d probably earned myself a spoonful of dysentery or something, but when I thought about the grass I was on I paused. There weren’t many grassy patches along the way the Golden Gate Strait flowed unless I had wound up in the park or something. Even then I didn’t get why I wasn’t dead, so after scraping dirt off of my tongue, I actually listened to the person who’d revived me for the first time since I’d been brought back to life, aching sternum and all.
Coughing up the lungs I’d just emptied didn’t actually happen, but it felt like it did. The warm, gentle sun radiated its kindness to my frigid flesh, which was much appreciated. Once I warmed up a bit, I heard someone say something in a very odd language. It sounded like a bastard mix of Greek and Hebrew, which I only knew because I took a trip to Greece (Story for another time) and spent a lot of time around the Orthodox church there because where better to learn about your Jewish heritage than Greece? That was sarcasm, Journal. I know you’re a book, but I think you should know when I’m not being serious.
Anyway, the confusing language threw me through a loop since I only knew Hebrew from school and my Grandpa, so I only got a couple of the words they’d said. I knew a pretty respectable portion of my ancestors’ language, but ‘River Person… Fire… Mud Demon’ made little sense to me unless I was about to be burned alive for being dirty. I had to clear some more dirt and mud from my eyes, but when I did that and managed to get a real breath of fresh air I looked around and saw no one nearby. I had to fully sit up and look behind me to spot my savior, and despite my recent heartbreak, I could feel the buds of infatuation blooming all over again for both people I saw. The man was a man, and I mean that in the best of ways. He was lean, but still well built, and his chiseled, Roman jawline gave him the appearance of a brooding father contemplating his next best move for his family. The grays in his hair and beard told me that he was experienced, tickling my thing for older men in just the right way though it was his choice of clothes that struck me as odd.
They were unlike anything I’d seen in person, and I don’t mean that his fashion sense was good or bad. It was just that his clothing was so unfamiliar that I was a little taken aback. His shirt had slits on the side and a small ‘V’ in on the torso in front of his sculpted throat, just a couple of ashy black and gray hairs popping out of the breach. His shorts were khaki of some kind, which contrasted from the tunic-looking thing he was wearing. To my knowledge, people who wore tunics didn't wear cargo shorts, but even then I wasn’t sure what the fuck I was seeing. Everything from his hairstyle to his choice of footwear was a little off from what my norm was, but he was the normal one out of the two. The woman that was with him?
Don’t get me wrong; a rugged manly-man gets my motor running all the same, but I always did lean towards women, and the woman’s white mane and blue lipstick? Right up my alley. Why her hair was white I didn’t know, but I was well aware of the fact that it made her look like an ice queen, despite the warmth in her features and the laugh-lines on her cheeks. The woman had a rounded face whereas her companion was all sharp lines and stoicism, her countenance giving me the general feeling that she was just a bit older than me. The man seemed to be a decade my senior at least, but the woman was young enough to have probably gone to school with me. That being said, I don’t know how her leather shorts, hairy legs, and absolutely bananas ‘top’ would go over in a social place like Fleetwood High. I figured that I’d just gotten picked up by some weirdos that lived in the woods, or maybe I’d come across some kindly Jewish hippies that didn’t know that drug-rugs were in this season. At least, I’d thought they were hippies until I saw the sword laying by the woman and the odd, Steampunk-ish gun in the man’s hands. The more I looked at their weapons, the closer I came to being sure that the man’s gun was clockwork and that the woman’s sword had some kind of mechanism to it.
After I’d been staring at the beautiful people for some time, the man saw that I was looking and pointed at me, laying his hand on his companion’s shoulder. The woman gave me like, three seconds of her attention before she hit the guy and got up from where she was sitting. I waved and she stopped, so I got up and started backing away. There was a rock in my backward path, so I fell over that because why wouldn’t I? Laughter was quickly silenced and I heard feet rapidly approaching me as I set myself up. The man trailed a bit behind the woman when she came to help me, speaking her odd language. I made out ‘klutz’, ‘funny’, and ‘sorry’ out of what she said, so I replied with something along the lines of ‘I am clumsy, I yogurt waffle walk good.’, which made her laugh some more and ask something. I didn’t know the exact question, but I did hear the undertone in her voice, so I shrugged and answered in plain English.
“Miss, I have no idea what you just said.”
Her brows raised. “You are not no-shell Kappa? Not Demon?”
The accent to her words was strange to hear since it was like a combination of French and some South Asian mix that wasn’t… influenced, would be a good word I think. It’s like she’d been born with the accent rather than learning multiple languages as I would normally assume, but that mixed with the language she’d been speaking before made no sense. “... Miss, you’re talking over my head. Name’s Gage Gauner.” I extended a muddy hand before wiping it off on the grass and offering it again.
She tilted her head. “Names?”
“Yeah, I’m Gage. Gage Gauner.” I looked her in the eye.
They weren’t contacts. I knew that much. Colored contacts had a certain vibrancy to them. The lady’s eyes were amber, didn’t have the opacity that colored contacts carried, and they had a slight glow to them in the darkening light. I didn’t know if the sun was reflecting off of them strangely or if I was imagining things, but she definitely wasn’t normal. “You are Gage Gauner?”
“Yes, I am,” I repeated, nodding slowly. “[My Hebrew name was Gatian].”
She seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. “You are funny man, Gatian Gage. What Hebrew is?”
“Uh… Evidently not what you speak…” I replied, my heart thudding in my chest. A hatred for The Queen started bubbling up in my chest and I wondered why British people always had to be evil or magical, because I was looking at two options; I was either going completely and utterly insane, I was dead, or I was on drugs. That’s three options, but I didn’t really consider drugs to be one of the likely ones.
Being insane didn’t seem too bad if what I was experiencing was it, I might’ve been dead which again wasn’t too bad at the moment, and I didn’t really like drugs, so I scratched that one out seeing as how my worst experiment was alcohol and I didn’t even like the taste of that. I might’ve been a pack a day smoker, but for some odd reason, I had a feeling that there weren’t any gas stations nearby. The longer I looked between the guy and gal that saved my sorry butt from the river the more certain I was that Kansas was a distant memory. Especially since I had no clue how natural the white-haired lady’s ‘do was. In a few seconds of confusion, I worked out the most logical conclusion I could from the evidence I had; The British guy saved me from dying on impact and/or drowning, lived up to his word, forgot to erase my memory, and threw me up on the bottom of some other river. It made sense in a completely bullshit, beginning of a kid-com kinda way.
Seeing as how the lady had a modest bust and few other endowments other than being super adorable, uwu-wat’s-dis levels of cute, I doubted that I’d made my way into an anime. Being reminded of anime made me cognizant of the fact that I was supposed to be good at something or other, so that made me smile. The grin was received with an odd look from the lady. “Why smile now? Something funny?”
“Do you have an instrument?”
“I do not know that word.”
“And I don’t know your language too terribly good, so there’s that.” My mood deflated like a three-day-old balloon. It still had helium, but it was a little squishier now.
She gave me a sad smile. “You die too?”
That one took me by surprise. “... Yeah? How’d you know?”
“People come from river. [River of Rebirth]. Many of them come of sad, many not leave. You seem like you leave, we go to town.” The lady held her index and pinkie finger out, smiling at me. It was like a peace-sign but cuter in a way.
“... Why people no leave? Er, I mean, why don’t people leave?”
“Some people sad. Sad hard when fail…” She tilted her head and tapped her cleft chin, making a popping noise with her lips for a few seconds. The loudest pop signaled the end of her brainstorming session along with the bouncing of her braids. “Deaf. Yes, sad when no deaf they seek, so they ask deaf of us. Watchers. [Peace Seekers]. We give peace to sad people so they have rest.” Her enunciation was very careful, but even then her accent was incredibly thick. It was also a far sight from hard on the ol’ drums though still difficult to understand.
I still got the point. “... You kill people who are too sad that they got a second chance?”
The man snorted. “Leos Common isn’t that bad, fool.” His accent was also thicker than a tungsten cinder-block, but it was clearer than ‘Lei-o’s’, as he’d pronounced it. When he spoke, I got a more French-Japanese vibe from his lilt.
“Your ‘Common’ sounds a little better, yeah,” I replied, giving him a sheepish smile.
The glare in his silver eyes was enough to make me look back to Leos. She rolled her amber orbs at my terrified expression, patting my shoulder. “He kills in sun. Valen guides in sun. There is sun now.”
“Valen? And guiding to where? “I asked, avoiding the scary man and his hyper-intense eye-contact.
“Me Valen,” ‘Leos’ said. Apparently, I’d gotten her name wrong. “Me, Valen, guide you to town.”
“Oh. Okay. That sounds normal,” I said, the lack of normalcy evident in the situation to me.
Valen nodded and beamed. “I am happy you are not sad to deaf! We go before Kaish guides you, yes?”
I almost pointed at the aging man. Almost. “You mean your partner over there?”
“Yes.”
“... If I don’t go-”
“Oh, no! He guides at night, kill at day. I guide at day, kill at night. I talk more and I am nice. Kaish is schmuck.”
The temptation to chuckle at that was bisected when the guy in question said, “Killing is easier.”
Valen cut him a dull look. “[Lazy Donkey].”
He cracked a smile and rolled his eyes. His next words were evidently only meant for his partner in ‘peace’ since he didn’t say it in Common, leaving us to go wander into the forest. Valen and I watched him walk for a bit before she grabbed my hand and started leading me in the opposite direction, saying that I was dirty and smelly. I believed her to the fullest. When she suggested that I wash up in what sounded like a holy site, getting clean in the river felt a little ironic. After I got out I felt a lot better for the tepid bath. Valen was happy to dip her toes in the water with an eye on the sun as it took its sweet time in getting lower while I cleaned myself. It’d been a bit since I’d first gotten my bearings, meaning that the realization that everything I’d ever known was long gone and far behind me. While I was casually rinsing pebbles out of my already messy hair, it just hit me like a freight truck out of nowhere. I went from wishing I had shampoo to wondering if there was even shampoo on the planet to straight-up despair. It knocked the wind out of my lungs and sent me to my knees long enough for Valen to come and shake me out of a stupor.
“Gatian Gage? Are you sad now?” she asked mournfully. “Please not sad now. You were well!”
I wanted to smile at that because she was just really cute for being nearly as tall as me. Forcing yourself to smile releases endorphins in your brain, which is a trick I learned long ago. Implementing it at the moment got me off of my knees with a little help from Valen. “I don’t think I’m ever going to stop being sad about this one, Val. [This sorrow hurts deep]. But I’m okay, right?” I smiled a little wider. “Life’s about making it through the next step with your head as high as you can get it, isn’t it?”
My words garnered another strange gesture from Valen. “You are not sad now! Not be sad. You are clean, so now be happy and we go, yes?”
“Yeah sure, let’s go.”
She nodded twice and grabbed my right hand, hooking one of her fingers into the band of my watch as he started dragging me out of the river and on to the bank. After a quick shake and jitter to dry myself and my clothes off, we set course for a town named ‘Rusval’. Valen wouldn’t say anything about it, but she was all too happy to tell me every minute iota of detail about the forest as we got started on the next portion of my journey.
… Hmm… I think I’ll stop here. My hand’s getting pretty tired and I kinda wanna read over what I have down. No, Journal, I’m not ogling you. Don’t make it weird, dude. Thanks for listening though, this has been some great therapy. Or thanks for letting me write on you…?
I’m gonna need some practice at this whole ‘journaling’ thing.