virgin-martyr

The neural rebirth of her brain took on the form of fire. Pyrotechnic blooms of thought. A flashing light illuminated her brain, as if she had become the sun. It was a kind of ecstasy, she thought, life will never be the same again.

She looked like a visitation, a hard angel, cut out from stained glass.

She felt she had been in the presence of an odd kind of madness, the kind of insanity generated by wealth, where people are spoilt and pampered and do not understand or tolerate what it is like not to get their way. A terrible sense of privilege that they were completely unaware of. Where will has not been tempered by awareness of others.

She could hear music being played in the distance, the resonant persistent sound of a harpsichord, the music running in on itself, a perpetual echoing of itself.

What was wrong with her, this odd susceptibility to an utter stranger?

She often noticed it was only when we shared the same qualities that we recognized them in other people. Kind people recognized kindness in others. Unkind people saw kindness as a weakness to be exploited.

Loneliness was the price she paid for all this luxury and beauty.

Women were eating or staring into space, or looking into the fire or wandering aimlessly around the room. And for an insane moment she thought, this is no different from normality, just women existing and surviving, this is what happens to women who don't fit into a world created by men.

The air had become violent with possibility.

She shook herself, as if trying to shake off this image of what she had become, a ghost, a woman covered in cobwebs, a woman who no longer inhabited her own life but trespassed over it.

When she looked down at her body she could she that she was real but how often now did she feel disconnected from her body, having lost herself in the ether of her mind? And her body was her only connection with the material world, the flesh and bone of it.

Like a tree falling in the forest, she was only falling because God was watching.

Collecting is a creative act. One of perpetual longing and desire. One is never fully fulfilled. Collections live in dread of satisfaction. There is that brief, transitory moment of satisfaction and then it disappears like dust in the air. We live to long after something, we know and accept the power of longing and desire. We are under no illusion that what we want is the unobtainable.

She was now a woman of two halves, half woman, half mother. Two bodies from different times conjoined.

For fairy tales had their own morality, their own cruel sense of right and wrong that pierced any mundane surface.

The attic was the best place for her; it was self-contained and petite, and so small as to be easily kept neat at all times.