I’ll stop using reverse psychology on you when it stops working.

Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City – Iathea
Current Date: February 20, 2040

Character: Sapphire Calae
Race: Human
Age: 29, physically about 23
Current residence: Arcadis Settlement, Iathea
 

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I know that there are things I’ll be learning about until the end of my life, but I feel as though there are things I should have learned earlier in life and just didn’t. The things being learned have changed since the world has changed and we took to space and then settled on this planet too, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are things that I feel I should have known earlier in my life but I’m just now learning about them.

Maybe I’m just too hard on myself, that’s probably what that is. It’s hard not to be growing up the way I did, and I’m grateful for the patience of the very few people I feel safe enough to be relaxed around. Not even a handful of people that I truly trust; I might have been working with the same gathering team for years and I find something that resembles safety with them but I’m never fully relaxed, there’s always mild tension in my shoulders and I don’t know that this will ever go away. It has something to do with trauma and, like other things, I’ve learned to make my peace with it.

An odd way of doing things I’ve learned about recently is something called reverse psychology. I asked Inoru to explain it to me because I couldn’t make sense of what I was being told by Marlene. She told me that I was such a good worker that she didn’t need to use any sort of that thing on me, but it seemed to work wonders on a lot of our temporary workers, the ones who are younger and still not truly used to the idea of working to help the community.

In a general sense of things, from what I understand of it, reverse psychology is a bit when you tell someone the opposite of what you want them to do. Marlene explained it in a way that felt too complicated for me, but Inoru managed to put it into words that made more sense to me. I guess that I understand certain things better with visual explanations.

Say that you’re trying to get them to clean up their room, reverse psychology if I understand it properly, would be to tell that person not to clean their room, to give them a reason why they shouldn’t clean their room, and make it seem as though the best option is to really not do that thing because it’s bad. Somehow, this works on certain people, and they’ll do exactly the thing they were told not to do.

I don’t understand how it works, though. Maybe it’s because I’ve been conditioned to do what I’m told. I don’t do these things blindly and I do think everything over twice before I do it all, but if I’m told not to pick up a certain variety of berries because they’re dangerous, I’m not going to go out of my way to pick these berries, just because I’ve been told not to.

I guess that teens and maybe young adults who have had an easier—so to speak—life growing up than I did might have a more wilful nature. That’s what this has to be in the long run. Then again, I also find that I like being helpful and doing the gathering tasks just makes me feel useful; feeling useful makes me forget about the things we’ve left behind on Earth and trust me, that’s for the best.

It’s been a really long time now—I know that as well as everyone else—but the sort of trauma I’ve gone through will never truly be erased. I might not think about it often—I’ll be honest, thoughts of the whole ordeal have only come up three or four times since we’ve landed here—but it still has shaped me into the man I am, and my behaviour reflects that.

I’ve been told that therapy could probably help, but I feel that my behaviour isn’t so bad at current that I don’t desperately need help. I don’t even know if I could talk about it. Inoru was the one who got me away from it all and I never told him about it; he knows the gist of what was happening because he was part of the slight group of people who bought my time—for my safety, in his case—but he was never told the details of things.

At this point, and possibly until the end of my life, I think it will truly just be a matter of taking things one day after the other; I deal with whatever comes my way as it does come my way, and I have help from the people who matter to me. I don’t think I can ask for anything else.

Final Word Count: 806

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m ninety percent sure you grabbed the wrong person.

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City – Iathea
Characters: Sapphire Calae
Race: Human
Age: 28, physically about 23
Current residence: Arcadis Settlement, Iathea
Final Word Count: 781 words
 

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You know the people who work with you are tired when they show up, dragging in tow a member of the team except that the person they’re dragging along isn’t the right one. Now, I know that there are people who have chosen to live in bigger houses; they’re meant more as a sort of common sleeping area than anything else. They’re built much closer to the shore to the point that the only time there is any water under them is when the tide is high and even so, it’s only a couple of inches. It’s very high up the beach.

I don’t know very much about the deeper things of tides, but I do know that our tidal range is sort of high. That’s the thing where you sort of calculate the height between the low tide and the high tide. The deepest houses that get beached, if that’s even the right word, when the tide is low, are set at twelve feet high. All I really know about the whole thing is that someone managed to calculate that somehow and we then managed to build our houses up. Some of the houses are never out of the water. It gets shallow, but never out.

In the bigger common buildings high up on the shore, there are a lot of bedrooms attached together and then, in the centre, there’s a big kitchen and the rest. I can never sleep over there. I know that some sleep there when the water gets too rough for them to get back to their house on time. Their house is safe, it’s high enough for that, but it’s still the part where they have to get back to it. That and some people just nap there during the day. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.

Years down the road and I’m still not fully comfortable around other men, not to the point of wanting to take a nap in a room where anyone else might walk into it. I can work near other men to a point but that’s about it.

Anyway, the point is that this morning, one of the women who seems to frequently be sleeping in the common rooms to the point that I’m not even sure where her proper house even is, came up to work, late as per our set hour, and behind her, she was dragging a younger girl. The girl couldn’t have been much older than her early teens and while I’d seen her around, I wasn’t all that familiar with her. Now and again, we do get teens helping out with the teams, it teaches them how to do the jobs that they might eventually be doing, themselves.

The thing is, though, is that the girl we’d had on our team on and off for the past few weeks was not this younger girl, but I certainly wasn’t going to be the one pointing that out to the still half-asleep woman. Marlene was the one who oversaw the team, and I was pretty sure she’d say something, and she’d say it in a tactful way that I didn’t really have. Not from lack of trying to be but yeah, I am as I am.

It didn’t take long honestly; Marlene was telling us where we were going to be heading—a somewhat new area that we’d started working in—when the sleeper and the girl settled closer into the group. It made her pause, she gave the sleeper a single, quiet look, raised her brow and very quietly told her—though there was a tinge of amusement in her voice—that while she didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, she was pretty sure that our sleeper here had grabbed the wrong person this morning on her way in.

Her comment earned quiet chuckles from the other worker and me and, well, our sleeper looked down at the girl, groaned and I’m pretty sure she would have facepalmed if she could have. From the look in her eyes in that brief moment, somehow, I got the feeling that she was tempted to just keep the girl with us but that’s not really how these things work, so she shooed the girl off, told her to get her sister out and on the way to us. The girls must have crossed paths halfway because it only took a few minutes before we were joined by the proper temporary member of our team.

I shouldn’t really find it amusing, but in a way, I think it’s just one of those things. At times, you just have to shake your head and smile at situations.

Not that this hasn’t been fascinating, but are we almost done here?

 
Timeline/World: Until Tomorrow – New York City – Iathea
Characters: Sapphire Calae
Race: Human
Age: 26, physically about 23
Final Word Count: 696 words
 

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It took almost a year for our team to drop back to five. A year of watching Marlene and the others argue with the man—he spent a year with the team and I don’t even remember his name—telling him to be gentler with the herbs and fruits; a year of him rolling his eyes, saying he didn’t care.

At one point, I do remember him just rolling his eyes, his tone sarcastic—something I had to learn about—and stating that everything Marlene was telling him was sooooo fascinating but, was she done yet? He had better things to do. I don’t remember ever seeing her quite as red as she turned out to be on that particular day. It was a sight to behold; I’m not going to lie.

It wasn’t long after that, that he actually stopped coming at all. At first, some did ask about his whereabouts but after that, we stopped asking and just went back to staying focused on our task at hand.

We don’t work every day and I know there are other teams just like ours. We do rotations, of sorts. We work a few days over the course of the week in one area, the following week we’re in another area and so on, until we’re back to the first area and I think this is a thing that sort of takes three weeks to do, so I guess that just maybe there might be three teams? I’m not sure. I’ve never asked.

I just like doing what I do and I tend to not focus much on the smaller details. I like knowing I have Rose near me as we work. People would probably think it’s just oh so sweet that I want to work near her so I that I can keep her safe but I think it’s closer to the other way around; though maybe, in a way, we keep one another safe.

I’m glad I didn’t have to ask Inoru to step in, as far as the other guy was concerned, I was pretty close to. He was always trying to get into my personal space and it made me queasy, it made me sloppy in my work and the general stress of the situation wore me out so fast that I had to skip out on a work day every week because I couldn’t even manage to get up in the mornings, I was so exhausted.

I know I’m broken inside. You would be too if your own mother had wh—… if your own mother had sold you to other men for their use because she was too lazy to do any work herself to get anything she might have wanted. I was three when she started. Three. So no, I don’t like men in my personal space though I’ve gotten better about it, so long as they keep to a respectable distance from me.

It has been years, I’m aware. Many wonderful years since, but this is a trauma that I don’t expect I’ll ever be able to get over, no matter how much I might want to. It’s one of those things that has left a mark so deep in my psyche that it cannot be uprooted. The sad but interesting part in all of this is that once I actually learned to read, though it still isn’t all that easy and plenty of words escape me, I started to devour any books I could that had to do with what was wrong with my mind. Those were not easy reads and I had to ask about the meaning of certain words often but they helped me to better understand myself.

Even now, whenever I can, I open up one of the rare few books I was allowed to bring back to our home from the ship. I keep them in a secure box, safe from humidity and anything else that would make them deteriorate. I want these books to be safe for a long time. It might be strange bedtime reading but, to me, it’s really fascinating, so why not read that?

To each their own, isn’t it?

It’s like living your life with the feeling of déjà vu hanging over your head constantly.

 
Timeline/World: New York City – Iathea
Characters: Sapphire Calae
Race: Human
Age: 25, physically about 23
Final Word Count: 677 words
 

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At times, I think I have the sight. Go ahead, laugh. I know this is probably just one of those things that make no sense whatsoever but when I was young and my mother forced to me do… things… to adults, I would let my mind wander, I’d let my mind drift away so I didn’t have to deal with what was happening to my body. I think that just maybe, it helped me keep my sanity because the pain, and not just those first few times, was unbearable but it was just how my mother kept things going. It’s how she acquired the items she wanted because any other effort on her part was asking for too much.

Do I miss the wicked woman? No, I don’t.

Inoru is the only one who offered me safety. He would buy some of my time, which I imagine didn’t look so weird to anyone else out there because he was already fifteen when mom started this whole ugly business when I was three. The thing is, he didn’t buy my time to use me, he’d buy my time to give me a bit of a safe haven, a place for me to be safe at least for a few hours. He’d do this now and again so I’d spend time with him and Yasuo. They were my only two friends while I grew up.

I used to tell them about what I saw when my mind wandered, though I didn’t talk about the ‘bad deed’ itself. I couldn’t. I would just quietly talk about all the water my mind used to imagine and the beaches and the odd trees that looked nothing like ours and just, for the most part, I figure it was the perfect getaway fantasy for a boy my age—and growing up—to slip into while being forced to do things he didn’t want to. Mind you, mom never sold me to other women, just the men and usually always the same ones. Though I suppose that our little settlement wasn’t overly big so the ‘choices’ were limited.

When we took to the skies, when I had to share my sleeping pod with Rosy-Posy, I didn’t feel quite so terrified. I’d never been near women and she seemed skittish enough as well that I guess we both just sort of settled. Things have changed since then, of course. It’s perfect that way.

When we came to Iathea, though, I felt like I’d just gotten this huge flash of déjà vu. It was a little terrifying. The beach we came up on, the trees a distance off, the freshness of the air, it all just seemed so identical to the places I’d go to in my head before. It became one of the most soothing things ever after a few months and that’s more or less why at times I joke that I might very well have the sight.

I mean, I haven’t had to turn to these fantasies and escapes in years, not since my mother died and since we’ve come to this place but I still feel like each day is a little bit of a déjà vu and it takes me a few moments to settle into that day. I don’t mind, I really don’t.

Living in this place, it’s been a learning experience and I know that Inoru would say I’ve done great progress coming out of my shell. I still don’t handle the presence of men very well, not in close proximity so I work best around other women or even on my own, but I can be around them, so long as they’re at least a couple of feet away and I don’t have to be in their presence for too long. My pretty Rosy-Posy makes it easier too. She’s this beacon to me, something I can focus on absolutely when I feel myself starting to slip away and it just feels so good.

I don’t know that I’d survive so well if she wasn’t with me.

I wonder if it still qualifies as a problem if it doesn’t affect you personally? Hm?

Timeline/World: New York City – Iathea
Characters: Sapphire Calae
Race: Human
Age: 24
Final Word Count: 582 words

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I don’t like people. Not in a general sort of way. I can’t help it. The way I grew up in the jungle we left behind when we stepped into that large spaceship has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It’s not something I like to discuss. Rosy-posy knows the basic of what happened and that’s as much as I want to talk about it. I don’t like men in my personal space, I’ve gotten a little used to them but I still prefer the company of some women but even so, only a handful in my personal space and only Rosy-Posy close.

It took a lot of work to get me set up with one of the smaller teams. I’m still not sure who decided that all men should help with construction. Not all men are made to handle construction work and a lot of women probably would have liked construction work.

Now, this was a while ago, things have settled since and I really love the life we live now but not everything is nice and perfect, I think something would be wrong if everything was nice and perfect.

I know I can’t be part of any group that plays favourites. If someone requests to be part of a team, it is likely they will be sent to that team. For a while, I was in a small gathering team of five, four women, including my beautiful Rose and myself. Things were going well when it was just the five of us but a few months ago, a man I’ve never really spoken to much was transferred into our team after he asked for the transfer and since then things have been tense and frustrating.

He seems to not care about doing the job well. He keeps on shrugging off our complaints that he needs to handle the herbs and fruits more tenderly. He says it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t eat any of the stuff so his handling doesn’t matter. He makes me mad. His behaviour is a problem but he doesn’t see it as one because it doesn’t affect him. I’m not the one who’s been telling him to take it easier, I don’t even want to be anywhere near him and he goes out of his way to work close to me. It makes me sick to my stomach.

I’m this close to bringing Inoru in on this situation because I just don’t know what else to do. He’s one of the rare men I handle because he’s always been there for me and I know I can trust him. I’d close my eyes and just believe in doing a trust fall exercise with him and I know he wouldn’t let me down. Most other men out there I wouldn’t even want breathing in my personal space though. I’ll talk to Rose about letting Inoru know we’re having issues with the new guy. Not that he can do much except maybe scare some respect into him. Our team leader doesn’t really care because he doesn’t eat any berries or uses any herbs himself. I know Marlena has talked to him about the issue and he shrugged her off.

There’s only so much we can do but maybe bringing in the cavalry will fix this problem. I’ve got nothing left to lose. I just want the tension to be gone, I want my breathing space again, I want to live and not hide away.

Cold Feet

Timeline/World: New York City – Iathea
Characters: Sapphire Calae
Race: Human
Age: 22
Final Word Count: 547 words

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I tell myself that I am not afraid but there are still days where I wake up, curled close to her and there still is a cold sweat on my brow. I know it’s from memories more than dreams, though I could be wrong, my dreams are fuzzy and I never remember them, at least not in detail, I might recall a smell or a feeling but that is usually it.

My nightmares are something else and I wake from those in more than just a cold sweat. I can never go back to sleep once I’ve woken up from a nightmare, at least not in the hours that follow. Once the day is through, then I can mostly slip into a restful state but that is about it. Nevermind that it has been years, I wish I could just wipe the bad past away and move on.

I feel like I’m—I don’t know the words to use. I feel like I’m not giving her all she deserves, like I’m not giving it my all but I know I am. At least, I am giving her all that I can give her and still at times it does not feel like it is enough.

I look at Inoru and Dariel, I look at Yasuo and Lumière, they are giving more, it feels like. They have not had easy lives either so I don’t understand why I can’t move on and give her what she deserves, even if I’m told again and again that it isn’t a necessity.

I feel like it would mean something important if I could bring myself to this but I can’t. My past haunts me and stops me. Every time I think I am ready for this next step, I freeze, my stomach drops and I am ill.

Nestling close to her, cuddling and invading her personal space comes naturally, it comes easily. Kissing her is wonderful and it feels so warm and perfect. So why do my memories keep me from discovering the rest of her this way? It feels achingly unfair but there is just about nothing I can do about it.

I certainly cannot force myself to do this, I have tried once and the results were disastrous, to say the least and I found myself sleeping on the hammock on our balcony for three days, as per my own choice more than anything else. My body’s reactions made me feel as though I’d betrayed her and I just don’t know how I can accept this.

No one needs to tell me that having a healthy sexual relationship is necessary, I know this, deep down in my heart, but my brain refuses to accept that particular fact. Considering how often I go back to this thought, I know I will have to do something about it sooner or later. Maybe there is someone within our village that could help.

It is a last resort sort of thing but I no longer know what else I can do about this. I want us to be closer, I do. My heart tells me it’s right and good but my memories are stained deeply with the past and will not allow me to move forward.

I will find a solution. I have to.