Chapter Text
I guess it's true enough. I didn't have a dog.
I've always been more of a cat person.
I don't really know about the family thing, though. The whole process was a mess, but when I turned sixteen, I did finally fumble my way through the mess of legal name changes. I didn't like the weight of the old one.
I almost remember why. These memories are new. They don't feel like the me that's become so familiar.
Maybe I've always had a bad memory? It seems like recovering from the induced coma and the drugs that Eva laced me with unearthed things I can't really place. I can tell you there was, at one point, a family other than the one that raised me. I can tell you that something about that family filled me with a passion for taking care of kids, and a violent, nauseating fear of ever being a father.
It's hard to digest.
So many of the memories that have surfaced over the past few years on Erid have made sense. Sure, I knew who I was as, like, a concept while Rocky and I were still in the Tau Ceti system, but only with time have the detailed memories—inside jokes, pet peeves, shirts I wish I or Carl or Eva had shoved into my duffel—reintegrated into who I am as a person.
It's these newer (older?) memories that feel like they belong to a stranger. Trying to pin them down is about as difficult as simultaneously knowing the precise position and momentum of a particle. The Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle. The Grace Uncertainty Principle.
And my name before was…was…? No, I don't know.
If Rocky held Yao's gun to my head and ordered me to tell him everything I'm suddenly remembering, I'd start with what I had known for some time: I was raised by distant relatives. Then I would venture into less certain territory.
…I think I was dropped off at their tiny, suburban house by my mother. I just remember a woman crying, bloodless knuckles wrapped around the steering wheel. She refused to look at me. I was crying, too.
I think there was something on the news. I remember adults—far taller and stronger than me, a terrifying fact—blocking my view of the television, firmly ordering me back to my room. I remember (not as a memory, but as a primal instinct that races down my spine until the soles of my feet itch) that the tone of voice sent me running, hiding, begging under my breath for a God I must have once been told to believe in.
Huh. A therapist would love this.
Glad I don't have one here.
I try to push this other, earlier Ryland Grace out of my mind. I know who I am now.
I…no, yes. Yes, I know who I am. I went through a frickin' crucible to find out, and I'm not going to start questioning it now.
I'm a teacher, and I have a lesson to plan.