Nostalgic Sheeta
The first thing Emmerith feels is confusion.
He feels it though he doesn’t understand what it is or even why it is. He doesn’t know to call it confusion but it is exactly that. He feels lost. He doesn’t understand why he’s here or where here is. He knows here is a place in which he currently occupies but he doesn’t understand why he knows that. He doesn’t understand anything, not at first.
The second thing he feels is recollection. A slight bit of it.
He feels a semblance of something once lived, a life of another time but he can’t reach back for it. He feels the nuances of having been something before, but what he feels now is an experience completely detached from it. He feels that it was there but knows that it no longer is. He knows that it may as well have never been.
The third and most significant thing that Emmerith feels is sentience.
It doesn’t matter what he was then or even what he is now—it matters that he’s aware enough to know it. He’s something that can feel and experience life as it happens. He can feel, God he can feel. He can move. He can be.
He takes in his surroundings, sees the crinkle of Mary’s eyes, disbelieving, and possibly quite as confused as Emmerith was, is. He studies her face and watches her expression go through an array of changes and wonders what they all are.
Then he smiles.
He doesn’t know why, why he’s compelled to. He just knows that he is—that something bubbles up in his chest that stretches his face and splits it open into what he later learns is a smile, a manifestation of happiness.
And so, with what turns out to be his fourth emotion, he grows curious. He wonders.
Is he happy, then?
The first thing Emmerith does is let his feet touch the ground.
Mary helps him to a stand and he balances himself with her hands, a baby deer on his own two feet.
The second thing he does is attempt to walk—and what a peculiar thing that is, hefting one limb in front of the other. It’s difficult. He manages. But when Mary lets go, he falls.
He learns then what knees are. He also learns that he can feel the impact of something but that thing, that shock to the nerves that is explained to him as pain, he learns that he doesn't have it.
The third, most significant thing that Emmerith does, is get back up again.
He reaches for Mary and lets her pull him to his feet. He wobbles, unstable and untrained to use these things she calls legs. But he feels determination, a surge of something that he feels low in his gut, if he had it. If he’s going to be a sentient being, he may as well try to be a walking one.
The first thing Emmerith says is—nothing.
It’s a shock to his system, a different kind of feeling that he doesn’t get when he falls or when he walks into something. He can feel this shock and he thinks it’s pain, too. Or anger. It’s something dangerous, he thinks. It hurts.
But he’s taught himself so far to be diligent. Mary encourages his persistence; she says that it will pay off. It always pays off.
So he keeps trying to talk.
He opens his mouth, tries to make the sounds Mary can make. He tries to form his mouth in the same way, tries to coax the things in his throat to work, please work. I want it; I’ve worked for it, so why can’t I have it?
In a very, very short time, Emmerith learns disappointment.
He learns anger and he learns sadness.
He learns that he is flawed.
The first thing that Emmerith lets himself do, the first real thing that defines him as a person and not just a doll to put on a shelf, a hunk of plastic and other bodily things mashed together with a spell, is listen.
He listens to Mary through his lamenting, dry but still very much felt, when she tells him that everything is a process.
He listens when she says that this is what makes him human. (Human, he thinks, imagine that.) That there are things that some can do and others can’t; she tells him that this does not make him a lesser being. It makes him exactly what he is, a person. It does not make him this or that, incapable or unable, it makes him Emmerith.
He listens when she tells him that it’s okay; more importantly, that he’s okay.
In the future, he’ll think of this moment.
In the future, when he can write and communicate with hands instead of words, with ink instead of voice, he’ll tell her what he felt in that moment—what he thought in a voice in his head that must be himself. He’ll tell her what he thought then and what he thinks now, in the months that follow.
He’ll tell her:
This must be what a mother feels like.
(On the same day, he learns the answer to the very first question he ever asked himself: Yes. )
