Session 1

Tir in My Eye

 There are certain routines, certain activities, that I have found to help along the process of sorting things out in one's mind. For myself, it's pepper -- or at least a variation. In pepper, one player hits a baseball to a group of other players that are about five feet away. These are just small grounders. The players then field the ball and throw it back to the man with the bat, who hits it to the next player, and so forth.

My version, being I'm one man with a tennis ball, is to just play the ball off of Benny's wall. This works best if the occupant is not around, of course, and luckily I had a good hour or so to make sense of the day's happenings while keeping the tennis ball moving. It's been so strange for me, getting used to a world in which abnormality, myth and fantasy, are *my* way of life. I can understand the physics of a bullet in flight, or the combustion engine. And while I remember Amber, and the facets of my early life, I cannot say that I am wholly adjusted.

But now a face haunts me, a small, brown-haired woman wielding a staff. In my mind's eye she looks at me with surprise before foul beasts jump on her, rending her apart. And there is nothing I can do, in this vision, the Tir seemingly mocking my ability. Imagine my surprise to see this woman burst through the strange Trump Gate we were hearded into Shadow to examine; imagine it more so to see the demons that hunted Ben and I a month ago following her out of the portal. I vowed, in a split second, that the Tir would not be right.

Bailey was her name, and as much as I wanted to remove her from the prodding stares and questions of my cousins, I found that I could not. Sullen, I distanced myself from them, trying to keep a lid on my temper. They were going to louse it up for me. I needed to know if she knew how I was, if she had known of me... and now, any attempts to find out such would probably be seen skeptically. Damn it all. I ended up giving her my horse, and rode with Gwyn back, lost in my thoughts and teeming anger.

Gwyn, my cousin, possesses a great ease to talk to. More than my brother, who seems to think my libido is affecting my mind, and I'm not really that close to any of the others yet. As I babbled, she was quick to point out all my contradictions -- in my beliefs about God, the Tir visions, and so forth. I just couldn't seem to reconcile, when it came down to it, that there were things unexplicable, and uncontrollable, that I was a part of.

As I was leaving, I saw a couple of things. That myself, as a confidant to others, am lacking; and two, well, I'll just repeat when Gwyn told me:

"'The death of one's cherished misconceptions is always difficult'... and that's a quote from the man the Pattern believes is God."

God, Dworkin, the Unicorn, the Pattern, a woman of my vision and demons dancing around my head. Quite a start to things here. I suppose I can just hope for this stuff to turn out right on it's own, but I don't' think that'll fly. Oh well. Let me raise my glass to treasured misconceptions. Here's to trying -- rhymes with dying.

On to Diary 2

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