First steps(1)

A few months have passed since that faithful day on the beach.

The first few days were rough. I could not control my body at all. The only things I could do were eating and sleeping. After the first month or so, I started to grasp the way in which to move my body. It was slow and sluggish, but it was a start.

About the woman that took me in. She was a street vendor, the sole owner of a shop on one of the many boulevards of Republic City, where she sold fruit and vegetables. I still don't understand what the people around me are saying but I started to understand the context of certain conversations and, most importantly, I learned the most important name for the next few years of my life, Naomi.

She was a wonderful person, everybody loved her, she showed kindness to all who needed it. Although she was a non-bender, she wasn't harassed by the bending street thugs. I would find out later that her son saved one of the triad heads from drowning a few years before he died in an accident, so the triads didn't bother her.

The next few months I started learning how to crawl and tried my best to learn the language. I was successful in crawling and even learn to walk, well if you can call falling every two steps walking.

About the other objective I set, well... I think that I was doing pretty good if I say so myself. I began understanding most of the words that people used on the street and in the shop. Occasionally, I could figure out the words because of the context, but there were a few words that I had no idea what they meant. By no means was I able to have a conversation with somebody, but if someone told me something I understood what they needed me to do. This made obtaining information about the world much easier.

I found a lot about how people live here, but most of the stuff I heard was worthless garbage, the only interesting piece of information that I got was that some people here have superpowers that they call bending. The more I learned about this world the more I remembered about my last life. Slowly, but surely, I started to remember more and more about my original world. My memories came in waves. First were my name and where I came from, then my language, my memories about family and friends, those made me very depressed, and finally, like a dam being broken, the rest of my memories came like a tidal wave.

In the past, my memory was decent, I could even say good. If I put my mind on something, I could certainly memorize it, but now... I could remember the things I ate for breakfast when I was 13. The scary part about it is the detail of the memory was like a movie, I could even remember how the table was set and which fork I ate with. It was amazing. The only memory I couldn't recall was about my death or how I got inside the darkness in the first place.

Looking at those memories, I remembered that I never had such focus power, now I could immerse myself in activities for hours with my full focus and not get distracted and I found something else. If emotions or other things tried to disturb me I could easily calm my mind just by thinking about the place filled with darkness. This disturbed and amazed me greatly. Firstly, I was scared of that place, but, at the same time, it gave me a sense of serenity. And, secondly, it made me curious about how much I could use this ability to my advantage in this unfair world.