Quiet Time

Chapter 32

     Emma sat down in the empty nursery as she had done several times now. Only her and Elizabeth were in the room, and Elizabeth had set up a small playpen filled with toys for her to play around in. The toys were picked deliberately so that Emma might use them to be characters if she wanted to. Emma was in a pink onesie dotted with little flowers and of course a thick diaper dotted with building blocks and bears, and her mittens which rarely came off once she had returned. She suckled on the pacifier that was clipped to her onesie while Elizabeth took her seat in a rocking chair next to the play pen.

"Ok let's try and pick up on our story from where we were yesterday," Elizabeth said, sitting down with a book of notes. "Maybe you can remember another time you hung out with all of your friends from college."

     This had become a regular occurrence since Emma returned. She would be sequestered off into the nursery and with the help of one of her caretakers she would attempt to remember one of her lost memories. None had been very climactic memories, usually memorable trips with friends or particularly sad news, but with each memory Emma could recall more and more people, and those people's faces would become clear in other memories where they had been blurry shapes before, and she could help string those memories along into a coherent timeline. They were never quite as exact as the memory of her graduation, but few memories ever were exact to even normal people.

     Emma grabbed a doll and a plush bear and started to play with them.

"I remember this one time," Emma began. "Me and Stephanie went to go have tea, I think." Emma found that recalling memories was easier when she was in a littler head space, but that also came with its downsides. Very rarely were people actually princess and very rarely did they have tea parties or balls. In that mind set though Emma often interpreted those events as such but she could usually get at what was actually happening.

"No I think we were just getting lunch," Emma corrected. She acted out the events with the toys in her hand. "We were at that place from before that had the good tacos. We was eatin and this ugly looking mean man came up and talked to Stephanie. Stephanie got all blushy while the man kept on talking about how pretty and beautiful she was, and all kinds of stuff they did." Emma giggled. "She kept trying to get him to stop but it was all so funny."

     In the back of Emma's mind she translated the version of events she just told. One of her college friends was stopped by a one night stand who thought their relationship was more than that, and just like that another face became unblurred.

"His name was Justin I think," Emma said quizzically. "Yeah yeah Justin. I think he ended up falling in love with Stephanie, though he always looked like an ugly troll to me." So Justin and Stephanie actually ended up going steady, and his face suddenly appeared in a lot of memories clearly.

"That's not nice to say Emma," Elizabeth chided. "Stephanie seems like a smart girl I'm sure Justin doesn't look like a troll."

"Well he wasn't pretty enough for her," Emma countered back.

"Hmm, I assume you didn't approve of them then?" Elizabeth interpreted Emma's words for her. Emma huffed. In her head another aspect of the relationship was revealed to her. She didn't approve of her friends relationship because Justin was a bit of a loser, he couldn't do anything right. Emma sighed, her old problem resurfaced again. Carmen and Elizabeth told her time and time again that she had a problem with failure, and that she needed to recontextualize her feelings about it.

"I guess he wasn't so bad," Emma said quietly. "He was just trying his best, but he had a hard time. He wasn't super-duper smart."

"I'm sure he appreciated your smart friend Stephanie helping him," Elizabeth offered.