Oh how she loves it here, here where everything is familiar. It’s what she’s used to, comfortable with, it’s where she can inhabit a world shaped to her size, where harbingers of practically no surprises dwell, where she can revel in tightly bounded pleasures all on her own terms, where expectations are slashed to a manageable edible digestible size. This, the daily rhythm of a safe life is an easy track for her to align to: ask no questions, keep your head down, one step at a time, ruffle no feathers, just get on with it.

These are her mantras, these are her crutches, these weak platitudes her only hope of survival in a world that whirls and swirls around her, a world that threatens to suck her up into its vortex, crushing her as completely as a tiny black peppercorn cracked in this unwelcome mill of life, a world that looms as a shadow over her shoulder, around the next corner, under her desk, behind the curtain. It has its own rhythm, and it’s radically different to hers. Hers is measured, controlled, serious and weighty; outside her feels overbloomed, full of restless dramatic emotions too swollen to swallow. Her Brahms to the world’s Wagner.

And yet, and yet she knows she has to leave. She can’t stay still like this, can’t stay hidden, can’t keep running away on the same spot: destination - Nowhere Any Time Soon. Sweet though the familiarity might be, she’s starting to become aware of a taste in her mouth that is both acrid and appealing all at the same time. She’s starting to hear traffic beckoning her through the sweet dawdling birdsong that has rooted her.

The structures she’s relied upon to keep her safe are starting to wobble, starting to creak, starting to reveal their transient fickle nature. Structures she’d never really questioned, never really tested, never fully laid her hands upon, neither a firm shake nor even a gentle jiggle, just to make sure. She never made sure, she just assumed, gave her power over to, expected they’d maintain, always be strong, could always be counted upon. But not now.

Her eyes are being pried open and try as she might she can’t keep them shut, the color wants to flood in, wants to engulf her, wants to wake her up and thump at her heart and invite her in this moment of now to breathe, to take just one deep long languorous breath, inhaling the possibility of a life reimagined, exhaling the life gone by; inhaling a world that brings vitality, exhaling the one she’s now dead to. One breath followed by another, and another and another.

Time fleets by, time slows down, time envelopes her, time elevates her. With every breath she’s feeling lighter, there’s freshness, and yes there’s fear. But this time the fear doesn’t shock, cripple or break her. She leans into it and lets it feed her courage. She repaints the landscape of her life, and this time she allows other hands to guide her brushstrokes, new energies which expand her world and offer gifts undreamed of, unimaginable even in that old small space she inhabited. Now she can turn cartwheels and somersaults in the vastness of her new deserved treasure filled life.