Private Finished Returning Patient: Konpeitō

Oh dear. The conversation was already going sideways, and Valli was blissfully, horribly aware of such a thing. It was hard not to guess at what Kon was getting at. Valli knew better than to fall into that trap.

"I don't think I'm qualified," Valli said after a moment. "I see a lot of people of a lot of different ages, and I've found that age and how people act have only the barest correlation. You certainly seem like a legal adult, if that answers your question."

Valli strongly suspected that Kon had been hoping for a clear, easy answer. For a 'you act around twenty five', so that they could run off and do something about it. But Valli had other things to focus on, so he lay his hands in his lap, considered his options, and then decided to explain.

"I think you're looking at this in... a very unusual way," Valli said. "You're trying to match yourself up to what you think concepts mean based on how other people react to them. People treat people in their mid-twenties the way you want to be treated, and you feel you're ready to be treated that way, so you want to be treated that way."

He paused to consider, and then nodded.

"Do you know what the difference is between a person in their mid-twenties and early thirties? Brain wise, I mean."

"Around twenty five is the point where a human's brain begins to degrade. They become slower over time as they age, their brains less elastic. That's why it's harder to learn things like languages as an adult, and easier when you're much young. But from the sounds of it, you're not experiencing that. So, mentally, you're not twenty five. You're in your prime, around nineteen or twenty."

So that was one thing scratched off the list.

"Do you know what, socially, the difference between a nineteen year old and a twenty four year old is?" This time he didn't wait for a response. "Five years of experience," he said. "Do you think that when you were born, you had all the experience of a nineteen year old?"

Maybe born was the wrong word, but too late for that.

"You will always be a kid to someone," Valli said. "There will always be people older than you, and people with more experience. Really, the island's relationship with age is very different from the narrow reality. Off-island, there's only one factor. On-island, there's four."

He paused, then held up four fingers, ticking them down as he went.

"One, chronological age. How many years you've lived. You have five under your belt. Two, mental age. If your brain's reached full maturity. Yours has. Three, physical age. The age you look. You look around nineteen or twenty. And then four..."

Valli leaned back in his seat.

"Experience. That seems to be where you're having the real issue. You want to have all the experience a person in their mid-twenties should have, but there's no way to get that experience without... experiencing it."

This was going to need some finesse. Young people didn't like being reminded they were young. They didn't like being told they were acting in an immature way. So he was going to have to focus on the positives.

"Realistically? You'll need to wait then. There's no magic bullet. Some people will always be bothered by the fact that you're chronologically only five. I imagine, if things were flipped around, you'd feel the same way. Would you date someone who had only been alive for a few days, for example? Even if htey looked much older?"