(come borrow my crown of thorns)

Her feet dangled a scant inch above the Persian carpet. The shadow they cast was diffuse and pale, hardly a shadow at all; she could see the bones of her ankles, cast in sharp relief even through the dusty rose of her tights. Her psychiatrist offered her a sheet of paper, pale blue, in English, because she was the ambassador’s daughter, and she cannot see a French doctor, it wouldn’t be secure. She looked at it, at its list of three pills, but didn’t lift her hands off her knees.

Ambien. Prozac. Xanax.

She shook her head and looked back down. “I won’t,” she said. The sessions went like this every week. They sat in silence for an hour, broken only by shouts from outside (a drill sergeant doing his job) and soldiers gossiping. Sometimes by questions from the psychiatrist: How are you doing? Fine. Your mother says you’ve been having nightmares. Yes. Do you want to talk about it? No. How was she supposed to explain that she had a whole lifetime of other memories in her head? That she wasn’t worried about the stresses of human life because she barely has one. What little she did have consisted of group therapy, this private session, and going home to write. She had a stack of composition books as tall as her forearm, and they’re all full.

“They’ll only help you,” said the psychiatrist, frowning. She pushed the scrip at Elke, and Elke still didn’t reach for it. “PTSD is a difficult condition to learn to live with. It’s a permanent change in the chemistry of your brain, and--” you can recover, but it will always be there, Elke finished. The whole screed was familiar to her by now, and she got up, slipping her flats back on. Outside the window, a column of soldiers marched. She shoved her hands in her pockets and didn’t think of… anything.

“I’m going to go,” she said.

At home, she picked up her cell phone. The battery was running down, so she took the time to answer a few texts before going up to her room. Her parents liked it when the phone stayed where they could see it; Aysel wasn’t so much monitoring Elke’s internet usage as making sure she only accessed positive parts of it.

She’d never needed the internet to tell her how to torture herself, though. Girls named Mia and Ana didn’t occupy her contact book. It’d been a long, slow fall down a long, gentle slope--I can’t control this, so I’ll control this. I can’t fulfill my duties, I don’t deserve to be taken care of. Her stomach growled, and she stopped in the little kitchenette upstairs to pluck a bag of frozen raspberries out of the freezer. At least her parents let her pretend to be an adult this way.

In her room, she popped a piece of fruit into her mouth (four calories per each, mostly simple carbohydrates, good for you) chewed, swallowed. She picked up her henshin pen from where it sat in a mug on her desk, with the rest of her pens, and…

Sometimes she went to the Surrounding, left Paris behind, traded Earth’s blue sky for an endless black expanse. In space, the stars didn’t twinkle. There was no atmospheric turbulence to interrupt their glow. The sun never really rose on Virgo, the light was a simple ambient magic, but--sometimes there were supernovas, flaring stars--but one day she wanted it to.

In Paris, she couldn’t see the stars at all. It would be nice, to forget. Since she couldn’t, she’d just…

The henshin pen snapped in her hands, and she dropped it to the floor. It turned to sparkling green-bronze dust as it rolled. Elke inhaled, sharply, and waited--for the memories to recede, for something to do, anything to do--but nothing happened. Nothing changed.

She ate another raspberry, and opened her journal. It was over now. She would never have to think of them again.