After gently kicking Kelima’s foot once or twice or seventeen times, Terry was forced to concede that the girl just wasn’t done sleeping off the aftereffects of the healing potion. It wasn’t really a surprise, but there had been the vain hope that youth would let her bounce back a little faster. Even so, it further soured a mood that had already been tanked by finding Dusk sound asleep on top of the unconscious noble. Terry assured himself that he wasn’t feeling possessive over his cat. Not at all. Not one tiny bit. Shaking his head, he shut the flap to Kelima’s tent and tried to decide what the hell he was supposed to do with the rest of his day.

  It was early enough that it was basically still dark beneath the cover of the trees. Terry found it strange that he always seemed to wake up around dawn now. He'd never been an early riser back on Earth. Then again, he’d heard that low-level depression could make people want to sleep in or just plain sleep all the time. Looking back at his old life now, he only had one thought about that depression.

  “What the hell was I so unhappy about?” he voiced aloud. “I did not realize how good I had it. No monsters trying to kill me. No nobles trying to voluntell me into their service. No mystical armies of evil. No stupidly pretty people.”

  He knew he was sugarcoating things a bit but not that much. He also knew that he couldn’t have possibly known how good he had it without getting transported to Chinese Period Drama Hell via vehicular homicide. He’d had no frame of reference to evaluate that life against. Even so, he struggled to understand much of what he’d done or failed to do in that life. Sure, people sucked. People would always suck. It was humanity’s default setting as near as he could tell. But he’d taken that essential truth and overcorrected his behavior out of largely meaningless fears about being embarrassed or even less plausible fears of causing a scene and ending up in a fight.

  The possibility of embarrassment had felt like a life-or-death matter, but he’d actually found himself in life-or-death situations and knew the difference now. As for causing a scene and ending up in some kind of physical altercation, that was just plain laughable. He’d never, in his entire life on Earth, run with the kind of people where that was a possibility. His crowd had consisted of people who specialized in passive-aggressive anger because, shockingly, they too lived in abject fear of one day finding themselves in a fistfight. Even the bars they went to were so low-key that fights never happened.

  Terry did his best to dismiss thoughts of home and how idiotic he’d been there. He couldn’t get back. And, even if he could get back to his world, he couldn’t get back to his life. Terry Williams was dead and gone back there. The best he could have hoped for was getting back and assuming someone else’s life. At least, that’s how he thought this whole thing worked. He honestly wasn’t sure about the mechanics and neither was anyone else. No one had even been able to tell him for sure if he’d pushed a soul out of the body he was in now.

  The hard takeaway was that the Terry he remembered from that world could never, ever benefit from all these new experiences and altered worldview. That thought dredged up an intensity of homesickness he hadn’t felt in a long time. It’s not like I ever dealt with that loss, he thought. I’ve just been too busy to think about it. Not that I really know how someone is supposed to cope with losing their life and a whole goddamn world. They sure as fuck didn’t cover that in Psych 101. He was doing his best to shake off that dreadful, overwhelming homesickness when other-Terry chimed in.

  So, we both know that I don’t really like you or possess meaningful interest in your well-being, right?

  Yeah, Terry thought back. I think we’ve covered that.

  Good. With that being said, I’m going to point out that you’re probably as isolated and alone as ever you’re ever going to be. At least, as alone as you’ll be without one hell-beast or another trying to kill you.

  Was there a point to that? You know, other than trying to shove me off the bridge of emotional stability into the swamp of existential despair?

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  The point, said other-Terry in an irritated tone, is that if you need to take some time to feel shitty and ill-used by the universe at large, this is the best chance you’re probably ever going to get.

  Oh, thought Terry, feeling a bit like he’d been struck by lightning.

  Also, and this is a one-day, one-time offer, if you feel the need to cry like a little kid who just fell off their Huffy bike for the first time, I will forever pretend that I have no knowledge of it.

  Despite the overwhelmingly douchey way that other-Terry had framed everything, it was a useful suggestion. His offer to ignore any stray tears that might fall off Terry’s face for the rest of the day was a kindness hidden inside an insult. If anything, the blatant assholery of the exchange actually made it easier for Terry to see the value in the suggestion. He was painfully conscious of the fact that he wasn’t a very self-aware person. That being said, he had been exposed to enough psychology and self-help books to recognize that simply bottling up his emotions was a short-term fix.

  It might even prove a potentially dangerous choice. One made even more dangerous by his newfound power in this world. If he’d just broken up with someone or lost his job, he could probably ignore those feelings without endangering anyone or anything aside from his stomach lining and blood pressure. The simple magnitude of what he’d lost, though, was such that he knew he’d bottled up some powerful emotions. If he didn’t do something to at least start to address them, those emotions might just come spilling out of him at some dangerous time or in some unpredictable way.

  For all he knew, they’d already been pushing him to do things he might have otherwise thought better of in other times. Not that he’d been kicking puppies for giggles or pretending he was going to place orders with elderly Avon Ladies. He wasn’t a monster. But he couldn’t say that everything he’d done since arriving had been rational.

  “Not that this is a rational kind of place,” he grumbled.

  Terry walked over to where the fire had been and poked at the ashes in desultory fashion. He managed to unearth a few coals. He spent some time slowly piling small sticks and then larger pieces of wood onto those coals. Then, he just sat next to it and stared into the flames. He kept shying away from the place in his heart where he’d been stuffing all his feelings about what had happened to him. Some of it was just good old male reluctance to confront his feelings. Yeah, he thought. The indoctrination is strong in this one.

  The rest of it was genuine fear about what he might find if he dared to open that Pandora’s Box. After all, there was no guarantee that he’d find hope at the bottom. It was all-too-likely that he’d only find despair. That, more than anything else, was what kept him from diving right in. He’d been running on momentum, anger, and a surprisingly robust survival instinct. If despair took him so far from anything like civilization, so far from what passed as normalcy in this world, he might just end up feeding himself to the next monster that came along.

  At the same time, he knew he couldn’t keep putting it off. It was, much like Terry’s student loan debt had been, too much and too big to ignore. Grimacing, he finally made himself stop looking away and faced it directly. As terrible as he’d imagined it would be, the reality was a thousand times worse. The thing that hurt him most was the yearning for the familiar. He so very desperately wanted to turn a corner and see a gas station or chain grocery store. He wanted to see cars. He’d have even settled for electric cars.

  He wanted power lines, traffic congestion, light pollution, and music-on-demand. He wanted single serve coffee pods and drive-thru burgers that were more salt than meat. He wanted to hear police sirens at midnight and to watch his crazy neighbor argue with the mailman about the alien lizards who were controlling the Amusement Park-Industrial Complex. He wanted home with all of its flawed complexity and commonplace miracles. It took Terry a long time to realize that he’d curled up next to the smoldering remains of the fire he’d long-since forgotten about entirely.

  With a sigh, he sat up and wiped at his face. It came away wet with tears and a shudder-worthy amount of snot. He hadn’t just been crying. He’d been bawling his eyes out. It had definitely been the right choice to do this far away from, well, anyone and everyone who hadn’t been rendered semi-comatose by a healing potion. Terry was aware that he still hadn’t really dealt with those emotions, but he had at least taken a vague, lurching step in that direction.

  So, said other-Terry, remember when I said I’d pretend not to know anything about you crying?

  Yeah, said a suspicious Terry.

  That was before I knew you were going to turn into Mount Saint Mucus. I’m totally going to mock you about that until the day you die.