Aventures with my desk drawer.
May. 29th, 2004 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
letterbladeFound this as I was cleaning out my desk. I wrote it on the train on my way back from Greensboro at the end of FWT--late February--and it's languished on paper ever since. Felt like typing it in and posting it, before it got lost in the mess of packing.
"Photographs are time frozen in film and congealed on glossy paper, and for that I treasure them. But they are nowhere close to eternal. Watch paper rot over thirty unchanging years for proof."
Post-Ohtori Mikage, Black Rose spoilers, obviously. Subject to typos. Don't know if I'll ever have the time to continue this, but I figured one or two of you might get a kick out of what I have.
It's six hours to Manchester.
On trains, I always sit alone if possible, and I am one of the last people anyone would ask to sit with. Time suspends itself for me, and stretches out in infinite parallel lines along which I do not seem to move, and I cannot help but think of my lost years. Sometimes memories surface, and sometimes those memories leave me weeping and shivering in my seat. I've worried more than one conductor. I am in England, and their language pours from them with ragged edges and strange twists of the tongue.
I know nothing for a fact. Not anymore. Perhaps, objectively, some things I could consider such, but I find it impossible to take faith in anything. Perhaps because one of the things most likely to be the truth is that Mamiya is dead.
Would the Chairman have been lying to me then?
I will not take a word that man says as fact.
But let me take as an assumption: Mamiya is dead.
Then who is Mamiya?
The definition of self from the exterior poses difficulties.
Even the obvious points provide confusion. My delusions extended as far as photographs. It is only logical that Tokiko's brother would be colored like her, hair and eyes brown to the point of black, pale skin. Should I take that assumption as fact? Likely.
(Mamiya...it's been decades since I saw you.)
My earliest memories of him are like two glass panes, two boys overlayed. Now, at least. The brown-skinned boy in the garden of roses and snow wasn't real; I have almsot convinced myself of that. Tokiko's brother, with that scruffy hair that looks so much stuffer than the white curls I remember by touch, and that dusting of freckles under his eyes. Not the boy who looks so much more like he should be Akio's brother. But that man only ever had a sister.
(Tokiko, your brother's sins run deep.)
Sins profound and hypnotizing. Mamiya of the green eyes was a consummation of so much that should not exist with beauty in this world. To see an uncannily beautiful boy stab a woman through the heart with a black rose is to glimpse a malignant thing so exquisite that it should not be allowed to perish. But where did one end and the other begin? I know Mamiya of the dark eyes is dead and buried, but I do not know when. I have never seen the stone. He would not tell me where it was.
Did the first Mamiya contain such darkness? I do not know. I cannot say. I consider his face in my memory and it seems impossible. But perhaps it was the End of the World that taught me to give green eyes and silver hair and brown skin to a face that held a soul of such cruelty.
And Mamiya is only the bare beginning of what I do not understand.
~~~
I suppose it would make the most sense to begin at the beginning.
I have no memory of my family.
I wonder at times if he had the power to alter memories, to reach into another person's head and manipulate their past and their very world. Or perhaps that is the doing of his sister, for there is nothing human behind those eyes. Or perhaps something about the Academy itself flays away people's pasts. Everone there always did seem raw and bleeding. All I know is that I arrived at Ohtori not caring about my family, my childhood, all that had led me there; and left it barely knowing a single shred of it, as if the Chairman had assembled me out of a kit before forcing me through the gate.
Of my family, nothing. Of school before Ohtori, barely anything. I think I left for college when I was twelve or thirteen; still barely even mature, at any rate. I remember people calling me Professor Nemuro, joking, almost mocking. The little professor. I remember writing to my mother, but I don't remember any of the words, just carefully inscribing Mother at the head of a long sheet of paper; and I don't remember any replies, nor her face or voice. Of the rest of my family, if they even exist, not even that.
I had a name, at least, that predated Mikage Souji, predated even Ohtori; but I don't even remember the other half of it.
I left school at eighteen with a bachelor's and a master's, and from there was offered the position at Ohtori, and accepted.
That is all I know that predates my walking through that rose-gilded arch, into the place that would become my beloved, beshadowed prison for thirty years.
~~~
Notes from another fandom: Happy belated birthday, Minerva McTabby!
(Have received my sorting. Am contemplating. Am resisting urge to do Utena crossover.)
"Photographs are time frozen in film and congealed on glossy paper, and for that I treasure them. But they are nowhere close to eternal. Watch paper rot over thirty unchanging years for proof."
Post-Ohtori Mikage, Black Rose spoilers, obviously. Subject to typos. Don't know if I'll ever have the time to continue this, but I figured one or two of you might get a kick out of what I have.
It's six hours to Manchester.
On trains, I always sit alone if possible, and I am one of the last people anyone would ask to sit with. Time suspends itself for me, and stretches out in infinite parallel lines along which I do not seem to move, and I cannot help but think of my lost years. Sometimes memories surface, and sometimes those memories leave me weeping and shivering in my seat. I've worried more than one conductor. I am in England, and their language pours from them with ragged edges and strange twists of the tongue.
I know nothing for a fact. Not anymore. Perhaps, objectively, some things I could consider such, but I find it impossible to take faith in anything. Perhaps because one of the things most likely to be the truth is that Mamiya is dead.
Would the Chairman have been lying to me then?
I will not take a word that man says as fact.
But let me take as an assumption: Mamiya is dead.
Then who is Mamiya?
The definition of self from the exterior poses difficulties.
Even the obvious points provide confusion. My delusions extended as far as photographs. It is only logical that Tokiko's brother would be colored like her, hair and eyes brown to the point of black, pale skin. Should I take that assumption as fact? Likely.
(Mamiya...it's been decades since I saw you.)
My earliest memories of him are like two glass panes, two boys overlayed. Now, at least. The brown-skinned boy in the garden of roses and snow wasn't real; I have almsot convinced myself of that. Tokiko's brother, with that scruffy hair that looks so much stuffer than the white curls I remember by touch, and that dusting of freckles under his eyes. Not the boy who looks so much more like he should be Akio's brother. But that man only ever had a sister.
(Tokiko, your brother's sins run deep.)
Sins profound and hypnotizing. Mamiya of the green eyes was a consummation of so much that should not exist with beauty in this world. To see an uncannily beautiful boy stab a woman through the heart with a black rose is to glimpse a malignant thing so exquisite that it should not be allowed to perish. But where did one end and the other begin? I know Mamiya of the dark eyes is dead and buried, but I do not know when. I have never seen the stone. He would not tell me where it was.
Did the first Mamiya contain such darkness? I do not know. I cannot say. I consider his face in my memory and it seems impossible. But perhaps it was the End of the World that taught me to give green eyes and silver hair and brown skin to a face that held a soul of such cruelty.
And Mamiya is only the bare beginning of what I do not understand.
~~~
I suppose it would make the most sense to begin at the beginning.
I have no memory of my family.
I wonder at times if he had the power to alter memories, to reach into another person's head and manipulate their past and their very world. Or perhaps that is the doing of his sister, for there is nothing human behind those eyes. Or perhaps something about the Academy itself flays away people's pasts. Everone there always did seem raw and bleeding. All I know is that I arrived at Ohtori not caring about my family, my childhood, all that had led me there; and left it barely knowing a single shred of it, as if the Chairman had assembled me out of a kit before forcing me through the gate.
Of my family, nothing. Of school before Ohtori, barely anything. I think I left for college when I was twelve or thirteen; still barely even mature, at any rate. I remember people calling me Professor Nemuro, joking, almost mocking. The little professor. I remember writing to my mother, but I don't remember any of the words, just carefully inscribing Mother at the head of a long sheet of paper; and I don't remember any replies, nor her face or voice. Of the rest of my family, if they even exist, not even that.
I had a name, at least, that predated Mikage Souji, predated even Ohtori; but I don't even remember the other half of it.
I left school at eighteen with a bachelor's and a master's, and from there was offered the position at Ohtori, and accepted.
That is all I know that predates my walking through that rose-gilded arch, into the place that would become my beloved, beshadowed prison for thirty years.
~~~
Notes from another fandom: Happy belated birthday, Minerva McTabby!
(Have received my sorting. Am contemplating. Am resisting urge to do Utena crossover.)
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no subject
Date: May. 30th, 2004 06:35 am (UTC)WRITE MORE PLEASE.
[goes into the corner and cries]