Have I lived? Died?  Dreamed?  Am I a fool?  Or a genius of wasted potential?

I don’t know anymore.  The veil between what was and what could have been has blurred in my mind until I’m no longer certain who I am, or even who I was.

I have a tale to tell, but I don’t even know where or how to begin to tell it.  Do I start with who I am now, in this life?  Or do I start with who I might have been in a different life – if I even was someone in a different life, and the whole experience wasn’t just tomfoolery from my imagination?!

I suppose I have to start the tale somewhere, so I’ll start it at what I assume was the beginning; whether that beginning is actually real or not.

Thomas Faraday was the name I was first born with.  Well, it’s the first name I remember being born with.  How do I know I wasn’t born before, and simply forgot myself?  After my experience, I doubt everything and believe in nothing.

But, once again, I digress.  Pray allow me some latitude with my thoughts as my mind wanders the dark and twisted allies which seem to compose it lately.  I’ll try to stay on topic as much as possible, with my meandering thoughts.

As I was saying, as far as I recall, I was first born as Thomas Faraday – a common child of common parents.  Thomas was my father, Sarah my mother.  Contrary to what most would expect, I was not a “Junior” because my middle name was based from my mother’s father, Edward, and not directly from my father.

The last of three children, I was the pampered “babe” of my family, and the light in my parent’s eyes.  This, of course, led to multiple conflicts and petty jealousies between my brother and sister and me, and dogged and soured our relationship all my life – though that’s all hardly important now.

I grew up spoiled and pampered, and eventually married a plain woman named Julie.  She wasn’t the smartest, nor the richest.  Her beauty wasn’t “beyond compare”, and she didn’t move the world with her charms – though she did always move me.  My heart was truly hers and even now it aches with a dull throb from missing her; almost as if I’m still missing an integral part of myself.

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Fifty-four years we had together, with one child to call our own – a daughter named Julianna – and then I died.   A simple life, with a simple death at the end of it, and that’s the end of my simple tale.

Except my tale isn’t that simple.

I was born Tomas Freeman – only child of Douglass and Maria Freeman.  Raised in a small three room shack on the outskirts of Hone, I grew up poor and rough.  Like all the village children, my earliest memories consist of doing chores from dawn to dusk.  (Well, it’s really memories of sneaking off whenever possible, with a focus on NOT doing chores from dawn to dusk, if I’m being honest with myself.)

Growing up, I was once again, a simple existence.  I didn’t have an innate talent for magic.  My parents weren’t nobles.  I wasn’t educated, couldn’t read or write, and had no calling in craft, politics, or medicine.  My father was a laborer – a lumberjack who sometimes tried to hunt to help put meat on the table – and I was his child.  It was my destiny to follow in his footsteps.

At least, it was, until the fall of my seventh year, when I started dreaming of a second life.  A life where I grew up with electricity and cars, the Internet and democracy.  A life where I’d had freedom and not just the name, “Freeman”.

Over the next several years, my past returned to me in my dreams – or else my dreams corrupted my present with an impossible imagining; I have no idea which is real anymore.  At first, I convinced myself that a second life made me smarter than all others around me.  Later, I realized that it just made me a piteous fool.

So what if I could drive a car? Program a computer?  Work a microwave!  What good was it knowing the Earth was round, rotated a year every 365.25 days, and that there were eight planets?  Hell – I wasn’t even certain there was eight planets in Earth’s solar system!  At one time, Pluto was a planet also – not that that mattered any either!

I remembered how to read English – which was absolutely worthless as nobody in existence spoke or wrote the damn language!  My history was worthless, as was any knowledge of politics.   What I remembered from math was the basic stuff which one would use for balancing a checkbook, with some basic algebra, geometry, and trig added in, in bits and pieces. 

Quadratic formulas??  I studied that in high school and college – and then spent fifty years forgetting it, before being reborn a second time.  I recall they existed, but I sure as hell couldn’t remember how to use them what to use them for, or any of that crap!

What I remember was the soft touch of my wife’s wrinkled hand against my aching neck.  The gentle look of the hazy brown eyes as they gazed at mine, as cataracts slowly clouded her vision.  I remember coffee, porn, and a million endless police dramas on the television which had no bearing on reality.

What I don’t remember was anything the least bit damn useful to living in what I would’ve called a “medieval, sword-and-sorcery fantasy world.”  I’d never learned to skin a rabbit.  I bought my groceries from the store; I wasn’t a gardener.  My concept of economics was worthless as the values of society was completely different from a technological existence.

I thought I knew stuff because I could remember my previous life – the problem was, all the stuff I knew was absolutely worthless in the new world.  In the end, all it did was confuse me and ostracize me from everyone else in the village.  I became known as a “moody moonie”, and grew up isolated and alone.  When I wasn’t doing chores and working, I wandered off alone and into the forest to hunt and fish.  As I got older, my father tried to draft me into cutting lumber with him, but I rebelled and devoted myself almost entirely to the hunt – and that’s where my tale really begins, I suppose.