Someone Else's Story
As a girl of thirteen, when she married Adigun, Kalasin could never have seen herself in her current situation. Then she had dreamed of accomplishing grand deeds, convincing Adigun to work for, rather than against her people, and a harmonious, happy home, filled with well-loved children. To Kalasin, that former life seems distant and unlike her own; almost as if she's looking back on someone else's life.
Dark turns in her life had never been part of her dream, yet they were something she had learned to stumble through. Even now, however, her life seems almost unreal. Even now, after all she has gone through, she still cannot adjust to the deaths and pain surrounding her, or Adigun's insistence on a son and the way he keeps pressuring her to give birth again, despite the healers' advice against it. When she looks in the mirror, even her reflection looks like someone else. The woman in the mirror doesn't appear in the least weary from too little rest or haunted by the slaughter of her people. She doesn't appear to fear the future as Kalasin does.
Disconnected from the past, present, and future, Kalasin begins to feel as if her entire life is someone else's story filled with the tales and experiences that make up someone else's life.