She didn’t like going in the garden. As the High Presiding Leader, she was required to have the garden, but she didn’t visit it. No law required her to. If it had, perhaps that would have been the straw that caused her to abdicate. If her political enemies had known that her weakness was something so simple ... but that was a secret she kept close.
She could see some of the bubbles from the windows of her tower chambers. She always glanced away and looked beyond the garden, to the walls and the city beyond them. That was her priority: the present and future of her people. She didn’t care to revisit the past, particularly not her own past.
The bubbles divided the garden like rows of gravestones in a cemetery. Each one contained a three-dimensional hologram of her. But not her as she was now; her as she was, recorded once yearly and also immediately after huge moments in her life (as determined by the archivists, not her). Some of them were happy and fine, but she didn’t want to see them. She didn’t want to see any of them.
Was it normal for all High Presiding Leaders to feel such unease about themselves? She didn’t think so. But she told herself it was fine. She was no Narcissist or Daydreamer, stuck in nostalgia or self-exploration. She had her priorities straight. She knew she did. She didn’t need to rehash the goals and desires of the past. All that mattered was the here and now and what would come after.
**
Image Source: Writer's Digest: Your Story #131
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