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Prox stood looking up at the shelf above his desk, letting his eyes travel slowly across the unmarked book spines there. He knew everything that was contained in the pages of the volumes there. He had, after all, written them himself.

He fingered the ornate cover of the journal in his hands, a book bought a few days after he'd come to this world, rented a space on one of the narrow streets of the exotics district, settled here; really, he had intended to stay four month, six months, no more, to be gone long before he could fill another journal with his ramblings. Instead ... two years and more, a home, children, odd as it was. He leaned over the desk, fitted the book into a space on the end of the row.

He never reread the journals. Nine years' worth of life. Nine years' worth of petty triumphs, quiet pleasures, large hurts and small aches. He knew now why there was nothing in his memory before his fifteenth year. He wouldn't lose his life over again. The original purpose of the journals wasn't valid. It was habit now, though, and a beautifully covered new book sat on his desk, ready to be written in.

A new chapter, though it was never that neat. The journals' pages never ran out at some tidy junction in his life, some place where it would be easy to close the book. Life went on.

Prox passed his fingers over the spines of the journals, back towards the very first one. If there were ever a reason to wipe his memories away again, he'd burn the books first, never know the difference. There were things he'd like to forget. His hand paused on the spine of a red-bound book, and he shook his head and left it on the shelf. Were there ways to communicate across worlds without going back? Would the people he'd left behind so abruptly even remember him?

Did it matter? He was who he was now. He would muddle through, hold up, take comfort where he could find it, do what he could to not ******** up too much. Five beautiful children, and a lover he had really begun to trust, and friends he didn't care to leave behind, not this time.

Plenty of hurt in these books. Maybe plenty of hurt still to come. Nothing he could do about that, except live, and not stop living. He patted the spine of the journal; the doorbell rang, and he went to answer it, turning the light off in the study as he went.