Let’s talk about what Susan Pevensie forgets: her older brother’s face, the sound of dryads gossiping in the leaves, and occasionally her house keys.
Susan forgets the tune of her favorite Narnian lullaby, the one Mrs. Beaver had sung to Lucy when they were still small, the one Susan had planned to sing to her own children, back when she had thought they would be there forever.
They say Susan forgets Narnia, but she doesn’t forget all of it. She puts it aside. She forgets faces and names, tax rates and the color of her favorite court shoes. Susan never forgets the weight on her shoulders that came from that responsibility, that power, that loss. She sometimes forgets she is strong enough to carry it.
Let’s talk about how Susan does not fit into her own skin.
And not just for those first years, when she is a grown woman stuffed into a child’s body, when she gets growing pains all over again, puberty all over again, when she lays in her bed late at night and stretches her limbs out to all four corners of the mattress and can’t reach the sides. Things taunt her from high shelves and she is cramped, small, bursting.
Her body grows to its old heights, but the skin inside her left forearm stays unblemished, never knocked up against a scalding copper tea kettle at eighteen. Her thigh bone does not ache before rainstorms, because she had never broken it in a bad fall from a horse.
She gets paper cuts in the same places, because ink and paper are the backbone of her power in both lives. She gets paper cuts in the same places and she is thankful, grateful, runs her fingers along the healing ridges and tries to believe the lie.
She breaks her wrist when a bicycle knocks her over on the way to a university class. The boy takes her to the hospital and then buys her dinner. When her wrist twinges, in the years after, she gets dizzy. She presses her palms into her thighs, feels pressure, weight, friction, and tries to remind herself that this is hers, she is here, she is.
When the skies get grey, Susan grips her thigh so tight it aches. She is breathless until rain finally starts to fall.
She forgets the way her body had felt that last day, hunting the white stag, her muscles tensing, her aches settling down and exhilaration rising in her throat.
She never forgets that this body, the one she will grow old in, the one she will live in, does not feel quite right.
Susan had been a traveling queen, living half her life in horseback, in the archery range, and chasing the Beavers’ children through ice melt streams. Now she is a schoolgirl, then a student of literature, then a grieving young woman making her way in an urbanizing world. Her body is soft.
So Susan runs. She takes up tennis, using broken old rackets at the community center and making friends with the regulars. Horses are not for would-be young journalists in mildewed city apartments, but she dreams of them. She sweats through her mornings, doing push-ups and lunges, and then showers it off after.
This soft body is a back-handed gift for stumbling through a wardrobe for a second time. Susan cannot bring back the exact shape of muscle and sinew she had lived the first two decades of her life in, but she will take this one and she will breathe deep with these new lungs. She will remake it in her own image.
