Over the years, the various therapists who’ve tried to help with my “I think I’m from another planet” problem have remarked that it’s amazing how my dream-forest remains the same. It doesn’t. It’s just that I’ve never been able to articulate the ways it changes. Over the years, I’ve seen one of the vast foundation trees fall, seen it covered in knee-high flowers that smelled like rotting meat, which broke it down into mulch before withering away, their purpose in this strange ecosystem served. I’ve seen smaller trees grow, faster than terrestrial trees but still slowly, swelling upward over the course of years.

If this landscape never changed, I would have had an easier time writing it off as some strange fiction, a way for my mind to code the trauma that changed me from ordinary girl to alien. Instead, it grew with me, following its own rhythms and patterns, over which I had little influence.

I kept walking, touching the occasional trunk, until the ground began to dip under my feet, leading me to a shallow bowl. There, concealed by the trees and roots around them, I found a garden’s worth of flowers with dragonfly wings for petals and nests of vines at the base of their stems, taking the place of leaves. The petals vibrated at my approach, almost as if the flowers were saying hello.

Of course they were saying hello.

I stepped carefully over vines as I made my way to the center of the garden, and the vines responded by twitching out of the way, clearing a path. When I reached the center, I sat down, checking to be sure I wasn’t going to crush any seedlings before I stretched out and let the vines slither over me.

They closed around my body in a dense cocoon, squeezing until the weight of them blocked out everything but the honeyed scent of the air and the light slanting through the branches. I had never been able to catch so much as a glimpse of the sun, but I had never seen this place in darkness, either.

// here // whispered the flowers around me.

“Here,” I replied sleepily. They hadn’t always spoken English, these alien plants in this alien place, like I hadn’t always spoken English. We had known another language once, the plants and I, but it had faded from my mind the longer I spent in Stasia’s skin, until English was all I had left to use. “Home.”

// here, home // agreed the flowers. Then, in a softer tone, if flowers can be said to have a tone, they said, // soon. //

“Soon?” I asked.