You are my anchor to this world,
you are my grave.
You are the reason I am damned,
yet I am saved.
And all that I thought I was
you whisked away.
All you wanted was my life
I already gave.

Breathing still feels foreign to me.

I know it’s an instinctive, innate action, like blinking my eyes (and, oh, what my eyes can see), but sometimes I still feel like I’m going to forget. That I’ll turn blue and pass out, and end up back where I used to be. But I exhale, and it passes. I inhale, and it’s back.

This world was once mine, so I’ve been told. But it is not mine like the other one was. There, I was the princess, ruler over all my dominion – save for the evil usurper who’s now been vanquished. I feel guilty thinking it, but I believe I felt more at home there than I do here. I have been told (repeatedly, to little effect) that this too shall pass.

There are people that love me here, even if it is only the love of a friend or puppy love just beginning to blossom. But there, I had the love of a family, even if it was fractured. My father watched out for me, cared for me. He died to save me. My new “family” reclaimed me from that, and for that I am thankful. For that, I cannot move on.

I had power there. I do here, too, in a way. I am at the top of my class (or almost, as Jeremie would never be able to live with himself were he not number one), and I’d like to think my musical skills may take me somewhere, someday. But I miss the flying, the harmony with my surroundings, the power in the palm of my hand. I am now tethered to the Earth, but as a captive in Lyoko, I was free.

Is it so strange to long for an artificial life? And which life that I’ve lived is truly the artificial one? Is it wrong of me to want to go back, to hide away from all this great unknown? Is it reprehensible of me, to abandon my only kin to an unknown fate with a malicious entity? Am I a Hopper, a Schaeffer, a Stones? Am I anything or anyone at all? I look in the mirror, and see this me, and look past it to the other versions of myself, with chubby child cheeks or elfin ears, and cannot, for the life of me, pinpoint which one I am at this moment.

There is a great banging from the other side of the bathroom door.

“Hurry up in there, Stones!”

Funny that Sissi would be the one making that demand. I sigh, and slowly pack up my things – material and immaterial. I tuck my bathroom bag under my arm, and unfurl pink wings that no one else can see. A glowing white ball of energy trails behind me, my only link to that life before. I open the door and Sissi’s frustrated face greets me. I step through, forever in the space between.