Her body is wracked with agony and a cocktail of drugs circulates through her veins before she can rise out of bed. Her days are long and difficult and weather away her already damaged constitution, making each dawn harder than the last. There is an office block several thousand floors up that cocoons her for the majority of her waking hours. She is set to hopelessly pick away at an ever-increasing pile of complex, abstract tasks that come from nowhere and are sent into nothing. In some wider lens what she does makes sense to something, somewhere. All that she knows is it just about keeps someone else’s roof over her head and cheap food in her belly.
There is an hour or so before her body collapses into sleep where she stares at the ceiling and does nothing. Her eyes trace across the little lights there, cast out by the miniature planetarium, and she watches a tiny mimic of the cosmos wheel slowly across the darkened room. It is here she is happiest. In the cradle of deep time and space. It is here that a desire kindles itself each night. A wanderlust, crackling in the dark. There is more out there than this. And by each dawn, the agony in her body has doused all desire to escape. She simply wants to survive the day.
But not today. Today she glances up at the sky on the long walk to work. Today she finds that an ember has caught in her chest, and now a little flame dances there.
Paddy Dobson
4th October 2021