This world and its inhabitants belong to C.S. Lewis. I am borrowing them for my own amusement and will return them unharmed.
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Carefully she put on her lipstick and stockings, her dress cut in the latest fashion, her high and slender heels, but when she looked in the mirror all she could see was a tall woman with a delicate crown resting amid her woven black braids, an elegantly simple dress draping her and a light shining in her eyes, and she could not feel as beautiful as she once was.
She danced with every boy at the party that night and whirled to the music, laughing gaily and flirting shamelessly, but behind her smile she was remembering the balls at Cair Paravel—dancing demurely with ambassadors and foreign princes, summer frolics in the fields with the Fauns—and her feet felt like lead. She let them kiss her hand and drape their coats around her shoulders, but in her memory the kisses of fierce lords and the feel of a lion's fur were far more real.
Gaily she nibbled the chocolates they gave her and pinned their flowers in her hair, and chattered about how this one admired her more than that one. But no taste could compare to the feasts of Narnia, and no flowers smelled as sweet or shone as brightly as those that grew on Narnian plains.
In the mornings she watched the sunrise, but here there were no rich colors of gold and rose shading a deep blue sky, merely faded pinks and greens tinting the smog-dirty clouds. She dressed in her bathing costume and splashed on the seashore, but the water was cold and the beach was rocky, and there were no merfolk swimming nearby to splash her merrily and sing their haunting songs, and before long she walked away.
Once she visited the zoo, and saw there a caged lion, pacing its twenty-foot enclosure of rock and steel, and never could explain to her friend why she burst into tears and had to go home, but the image gave her nightmares of cold voices, stone knives and huge, sorrowful eyes for weeks afterward.
She stopped speaking to Edmund for days after he presented her with a delicate painting of her dancing with a faun, but the painting was hidden in the very bottom of her chest of drawers, spotted with tears.
When their cousin Eustace visited with tales of a fantastic underground realm and a Marsh-wiggle, she fled to her bedroom and locked herself in, blocking from her mind all memories of a young boy named Caspian and his bright smile, refusing to think of him, or to imagine him old and decrepit.
Every morning when she woke up, she said quietly, — I don't believe in fairy tales— and sometimes she could believe it.
Eventually she managed it. She became numb to everything, walking through life without experiencing any of it, smiling at her siblings' troubled looks, and assuring her parents that she was fine. She attended school, and went out with a few young men, and did the things she thought a normal young woman should do.
She could not think of it—of the life she had once led, of the name she had once been known by. For each word was like a dagger in her heart, and the pain would not stop if it once began. Above all she could not think of Him, and when Peter came excitedly to her to tell her of going for a dinner with "our folk," of a chance, maybe, to go back, she screamed at him, putting her hands over her ears to block out any sound.
Because she could not go back. He had said so. And so it was better to forget it had ever happened, but still she lived with that wordless yearning in her heart, because after all was said and done, the slender girl with the sad eyes who drove the college boys to distraction was still Susan the Gentle, a Queen of Narnia.
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