biography
Around the age of something, say 15, Natayla was having problems remembering the past few years, and then one day it all just stopped. It stopped in that her memories were sucked into a weird void where she could only scratch at what might have happened, pictures didn't help, smells, music - things that normally were suggested to spur memories and thoughts of a person's life were generally rather helpful, it just didn't seem to make a dent at all. The day it stopped was when she was 17 and a half. Her father would remember that morning for as long as he would live, maybe many lives after that. She woke up in a cold panic, not knowing any of the things around her and lashing out rather violently at the things in her room, down the stairs and out of the house. Countless doctors and specialists her father took her to, in and out of offices with her the same weird look on their heads. After a steady five years of just that, he started peppering in therapy - there was a mass of information just blanked out from his little girl's mind and he had no idea how that had happened. She woke up on a Thursday with it completely gone. Really, this should have come to no great surprise to her father, just a small one - he'd been monitoring her for some time since the adoption, as they'd told him some of her family history and what was prone to happen. But allegedly, the safe mark had past and he felt that she was fine and in the clear for the rest of her life. -- truthfully, Talya didn't mind so much after she got all the facts in front of her, it was just going to be part of her life. The tail end of high school edging forward, they found that all of the faculty was sympathetic and let her finish her studies and her tests at later hours or at home altogether after the first week back, awkward conversation and blips of anxiety were peeking through her normally quite cheery demeanor, to the point that her best friends were frustrated to the point of stalking off.

Thankfully, despite that happening, Talya graduated second in her class in 2000 - which while her father was a little disappointed by the slip in rank, he was more than happy that it didn't seem to hinder his daughter's drive or will. The next summer was spent with more public service than she'd done ever before, though mainly it was housed around people and animal shelters, but her favorite being the community garden that was a half an hour away from the school. That's where, so she'd been told, she kept herself busy most of the summers for the past five years, and while she wasn't really all much for the sun, the work was pleasing. She started walking dogs with a bright red umbrella that her grandmother had gotten her that was tucked away in her closet, along with a box full of shiny red costume jewelry that was at least from a few decades ago - but that wasn't from her. The box was old and nicked, the glass panel on the top sort of too old to try to repair at all, but she knew she loved it each time she came across it. All beaded and sparkly, linked with chain and crystals to drape around her head, it hung in the center of her forehead and at her temples. She wore it when she cleaned their living room, she wore it whenever her father wasn't around - the one time she could tangibly remember, she threw his hands up he nearly broke one of the bracelet chains. Red and angry, he did apologize after the fact, but ever since then, Talya felt they were safer in the little box, she lied, told him they were donated - he was a good man, mostly. Little bit of an anger issue, but she understood, they were what they had. They were what was left for each other.

His wife's side of the family wasn't generally talked about for any number of reasons, her father not knowing whether or not he should blame what happened to her in her youth on genetics, if it was because she simply wasn't there anymore, because of the way that the family's chemical balance seemed to just be ever so off - or that's what he was told. Truthfully, it bothered Django more than it bothered his daughter. She was a well adjusted little thing when he and her mother brought her home from the hospital, watching her grow and become comfortable in her bones. For all intents and purposes, she seemed to be a, despite the warnings of the other side of the family, a normal, healthy little girl. (In her own opinion later on, she would think much the same, she'd seen photographs, she knew intellectually what happened and how her childhood was, so she had no outward qualms with how things decided to play out - she was lucky she was alive, that was all anyone could ask for.)

College was something of a difficult subject in the house - always expecting that she'd go and do wonderful things, by the time it rolled around, he wasn't sure if she was ready for such things, gently fighting with Talya for the better part of a year before it was settled - she had already been accepted and it would be insane for her not to go through with it - their army of therapists and counselors, while were hesitant, agreed that if she stayed close to home for the first years and involved her father everywhere she could, it would be for the betterment of their relationship and her abilities to move forward in life. -- her first few years at Cornell, were at best, difficult, at worst awkward and quiet. While she excelled at her courses (which made her father very, very proud, of course) there was something lacking in the social atmosphere, like there was a part of her that just never quite got connected to her. Thankfully, by the time she'd gotten to Boston, she'd mostly found her footing as she'd gotten older, a little wiser and eventually finding someone who would make her feel much more like a version of herself that she could live with.

Enter her taking Anthropology of Religion, where she'd met Professor Harkness, who after a while, took a shining to Natayla - after their semesters together were over, they'd become friends outside of school. She was a much older woman who had many opinions and facts to impart on Natalya, mostly how to look at things and how to breath. Showing her how to look for what she came from, where she was going and how people everywhere were shaped. She was endlessly interested in all this - and somewhere between that summer and the upcoming winter, they'd both noticed how fond she was of children and how easy it was for her to be around them. This made the world much easier, making her feel like she'd picked the right thing to follow through with her life (both of them joking from time to time about how she should up and move, just go off and they could open a palm reading spot off a busy route on a road up near New York).

After the long haul there and missing just about every party she could have missed, Natalya graduated and straight away got an intern job on top of working at two different daycares just because, well, not just because - living by yourself in any kind of downtown area never was cheap and she just wasn't ready to make the leap into sharing any kind of space with anyone. This was around the Christmas when her father invited her back home to meet the woman he was sharing his life with and her daughter, who was living at the house and while she wasn't in Talya's room, it just didn't exactly sit well until that New Years when they were quite comfortable with each other.

For the time being, Natalya has therapy every other week and is beside herself with excitement over getting to head the department and get her own class (she's bought out all the apple pom streamers she could find for the doors and walls around her room) -- there are things that still bother her, she's not particularly sure how she feels about her father's relationship with a woman who is ..considerably younger than him, but they get along well enough. She keeps her favorite professor looped in to all things that she feels she'd be interested in and has been working quietly in her own studies with an alter in her apartment she's finally happy with. She's not comfortable, there is still something very important that is missing, but in this present, it's the most settled she's ever felt.