Quest 128

After spending the better part of a week repeating back everyone else's words as they said them to me, it's really a refreshing and welcomed change to sit down and write some of my own, instead. We've had curses before that have prevented us from speaking our mind, either by forcing us to speak in verse or making us write in letters or changing the manner of it in some way or another, but I always thought of those as...as games, really. A new challenge to master, over the course of a day: could I make myself heard and understood, despite the obstacles and conditions the City had put in my way? And normally I can, and it's the challenge of succeeding at it that makes it an entertainment, not a punishment.

But I know you detest those sorts of curses, Cain. And now I think I have a better understanding as to why.

I have my heart back now. And I'm still a little--jumbled, I think, was the word I was using earlier this morning, when it first came back. But I'm terribly grateful to all of you who looked after me and worried for me and searched for answers for me while I was without it, and Princess Tutu, I can't possibly thank you enough for restoring it to me in the end. I'm deeply in your debt.

That's what it is, that condition, being so dull and emotionless and fragile--it happened because I gave up lost my heart. So if there is anyone still out there still behaving or feeling that way, or any friend of such a person worried sick about them, that's what it is. So don't lose hope. There's an answer after all.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and sometimes we learn the best lessons from the worst circumstances. Perhaps that's foolishly optimistic of me to say, but I've suddenly found myself able to be optimistic at all once again, and so I'm going to be selfish and indulge in it for now.

Someone very wise once told me that no matter what happens, things always get better, and that's the reason why we have to hold on with everything we have through the worst of times. I can't begin to count how many times I've repeated that to myself, in my time spent here in the City, and I imagine I'll say it to myself just as many times in the future still to come. But if there's one lesson I've learned from all this, it's that the worst circumstances hurt so much because they happen to the people we love so much.

It's an odd thing to think, isn't it? That perhaps sometimes suffering and hurting is better than feeling nothing at all, because at least when one is hurting, they're still feeling?

I've learned a lot of lessons from all this.

( Private to Ahiru )

There's twenty-four days left in October now. And I've vowed to go this whole month without letting the City get any misery out of me. It's not much, I know, but I'm going to keep to it as long as I can, and see how long it'll last me. With any luck, I'll make it the whole way through; I do hate losing, after all.

It helps that I can finally find it in myself to smile again.


[OOC: Rosella got her heart back last night at midnight, thanks to the efforts of Princess Tutu, so Zombie!sella is no more thank goodness!]