Word Count: 562

It was amazing how many things could change in a week. All the hundreds of little things she'd taken for granted, or the things she'd assume would always remain the same.

Had it only been a week? It'd felt longer in her prison. Paris felt like she'd aged years since she'd last taken a breath of fresh air, since she'd last seen the sunlight. She took her first step out of the hospital doors into what seemed to be an abnormally bright world, so used to the darkness had she become. She felt blinded and unprepared, thrust suddenly back into a world that no longer seemed familiar to her.

The important things were no different. Momma and Beau's house was the same as it'd been; Anna and Sassy had not lost their affection; her baby sister still smiled the sort of toothy grins that could melt hearts. Paris stood in the middle of Chris's old bedroom with the cat and dog twining about her legs and her baby sister babbling behind her, and she thought how foreign it all seemed. Here there were no bars to keep her confined, no locked doors to keep her trapped inside. The footsteps she heard coming down the hall were not a warning of things to come.

She and Chris would spend their weeks of recovery at Chris's parents' house, hiding away from the rest of the world as they attempted to settle back into normal lives.

But what was normal?

Paris no longer felt as if she knew the answer.

She stood in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at a face gone thin and pallid, and thought that maybe it wasn't everything around her that had changed. Maybe it was her. Maybe all that time spent locked away, aging years in a span of days, had changed her beyond recognition.

She'd lost weight. She could see it in her face, in the subtle protruding of bones beneath her skin. She stepped onto the scale and was unsurprised to watch it settle on the low nineties.

Her eyes no longer gleamed the way they used to. They looked dark and sunken—haunted, hollow. Her emotions didn't reach them. Not her anger. Not her relief. They looked empty and detached. Tired. Purple bruises marred the skin around her eyes; heavy bags pulled her once bright and chipper expressions into something tired and ragged.

She could see the veins beneath skin gone from creamy to white. Her face was swollen, colored blue and purple along her temple and jaw. Her lips were dry and cracked, scabbed over where they'd been split open.

Her nails were chipped and brittle, her hands unsteady, shaking as they rose to send careful fingers across her face, up to her hairline.

Her hair had lost its luster. It hung thin and limp down her back when once it'd been such a source of pride. She'd spent so long growing it out, spent so much time and effort into managing it, into keeping it healthy, that the sight of it looking so lackluster—like something gone flat and dead—brought tears to redden her eyes and wet her cheeks.

The girl in the mirror was not the one from a week ago. Aged by pain and grief, the girl she used to be was gone.

And Paris wondered, would she ever see that happy girl again?