Has anyone ever asked you to do something really difficult? And you were excited to try, but it just seemed impossible? Maybe you weren't really sure you were up to the challenge?

Sometimes when Princess Aurora lies in bed at night, finding herself ironically unable to sleep, she tries to write a love story for herself like the ones Aunt Fauna loves to read aloud. She always has to try many times, for she finds that the story goes off track rather easily and it becomes a depressing muddle of nonsense, but the nights are long and by morning, she usually has a story she's happy with.

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Aurora. An evil fairy cast a curse on her so that she would die on her sixteenth birthday. To save her from this fate, three good fairies gave up their magic and hid her in the woods, where they raised her as a peasant girl named Briar Rose.

On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Briar Rose fell in love with a boy she met in the woods. That evening when the three good fairies told her the truth about who she was, she was devastated that they could not be together. (For this part of the story, Aurora uses the reason her aunts thought she was upset. Every other possible reason steers her tale irrevocably off track—and she has tried them all.)

When Briar Rose returned to the castle, the evil fairy was waiting for her, and lured her into a deep slumber. As luck would have it, however, the boy she met in the woods was Prince Philip, to whom she had been betrothed since the day she was born, and he was more than happy to come to her rescue. In a fiery battle, Philip defeated the evil fairy and awoke his Princess with the kiss of true love, and they lived happily ever after.

Aurora likes the story well enough, even though it makes her queasy. Usually by the end of the night, she has to change the names in the story so that she doesn't feel like it's about her anymore.

She hates that she has to leave out her anguish, her feelings of betrayal, her meeting with the evil fairy who cursed her and how for an instant, the evil fairy was the only one making sense. She hates how she has to leave out the death of Briar Rose and the feeling that everything that happened that day seemed like destiny in the worst possible way. Her fate was unavoidable.

Everything is as it should have been from the beginning.

Aurora doesn't see Briar Rose when she looks in the mirror anymore. Briar Rose liked to make jokes, to break rules, to think about things and to speak her mind. Princess Aurora isn't allowed to do any of those things, and really, it's much easier when she doesn't try.

She does put a lot of effort into Philip, because when she awoke from her cursed sleep to the feeling of his lips on hers, and when Aunt Flora whispered, "This is Prince Philip" and she learned that Philip and the stranger in the woods were one and the same, she wanted to be as happy as she had been before. She wanted to pretend that the last few hours hadn't happened, and she wanted to feel as though that were the best day of her life and Philip were the center of her universe again.

But just as she had very quickly become a different person—just as Briar Rose and Princess Aurora are not the same, the stranger in the woods and Prince Philip are also two very different people. The stranger in the woods fell in love with a beautiful peasant girl. He was taking a day or two off from his responsibilities as a royal. The man who was betrothed to Aurora is just as bound by his destiny as she is, and in this way, Aurora finds that the harder she tries to be in love with Philip the way Briar Rose was in love with her stranger in the woods, the more she succeeds in hating him for his role as a link in the chains of her destiny.

She especially hates that he still thinks of her as perfect. He says it all the time. "You are so perfect, my Aurora;" "Of course she can—she'll be perfect;" "Is my wife not the most perfect woman in all the land?" She hates it because it is a reminder that she can never truly be Princess Aurora, no matter how hard she tries. Princess Aurora is supposed to be perfect. She is merely a ghost of a happy peasant girl trying to be the person everyone wants her to be.

In a way, the good fairies did prepare her for this life, because they taught her never to speak to strangers. This has proved invaluable. Aurora avoids speaking as often as she can, because she is absolutely certain that if she speaks too much, Briar Rose will escape and everyone will realize that she is not who she is supposed to be.

Mostly, though, Princess Aurora succeeds in being relatively happy, if only she reminds herself not to think. As the evil fairy told her, the only thing Princess Aurora really needs to do is to be where she's supposed to be when she's supposed to be there, and Aurora has always been very good at that.

After all, if there's one thing the events of her sixteenth birthday taught her, it's that her life is not her own. It doesn't matter what she does or where she goes—she'll always end up right where someone else wants her to be.