So this is what's happening...

What happened to Grace Connor next…

The girl opens her eyes and stretches, it is cold but she feels little, less and less every day and this aspect of her existence as is the case with so many other things in her life barely registers.  As she crawls into consciousness she thinks about her day.  Every day is a challenge; every day needs planning in the finest detail…

Her disappointment of 3 months ago was still to her irritation being processed but she was almost there.  All that planning, all that thought. She had thought herself so clever, so superior.  The crashing disappointment when she realised that her actions weren’t enough had hit her hard enough to make taking breath difficult for a time.  Now her response was less dramatic…it would have suited her more if she had achieved what she had set out to do but in it’s impossibility she has learned to manage the factors that made it impossible…as much as it was possible to manage them any way.

Looking around her bedsit she identified the clothes she would wear that day by their proximity to her bed…the bedsit in which she lives in is characterised by an entire lack of cohesion…nothing fits with anything – furniture, curtains, bedding, all from entirely different places and times…their origins perversely disparate as if someone had meticulously planned the composition of the room to represent as many worlds as the objects that were in it.  It was what had attracted her to the flat…not that she had that much in the way of options…a tight budget and a tight deadline…she’d only had this one and another to choose between…still not for nothing she’d looked at it and been able to picture herself existing here…just another disparate element housed in the same room as the rest.

Her acceptance that the removal of herself from her life had not given her the relief she had wanted had come slowly, painfully…unwanted and unanticipated as it was.  She’d expected to walk down the street feeling exhilarated by the freedom of it, but no such high had been forthcoming…instead she’d become suffocatingly aware of the looks she got from strangers as she passed by them…she knew they were judging her…making decisions about her.  It was just the same as it had been in the past that she had so deliberately left behind, she had achieved nothing.

This frustrating discovery had left her with only one option, a more extreme removal.  Her challenge of seeing if she could remove herself from the world that she lived in was replaced by that of removing herself from the world…at least in terms of face to face interaction.  Her work as her writer, her leisure such as it was, her requirements in terms of sustenance were all conducted from the two rooms that made up the bedsit…that part with the help of the internet had turned out to be relatively easy…her current challenge was to reduce the amount of people she was forced to speak to at her door when they delivered the things that were essential to maintain her health.  This had proved infinitely more complex but she was gradually succeeding. 

She made her calculations as she did every morning…it was now 2 weeks and 1 day since she had used her voice, since she had spoken to anyone.  Her only communication had been made through the medium of the keyboard and that was with people she hadn’t ever seen in person.  It would be at least another week before her next delivery and today she was going to work on a plan to extend that by another 2 weeks…it was just possible that she was going to succeed in this as she had in walking out of her home and school and all the relationships that had been part of that environment…so confident was she that she could achieve it that she had already begun to consider what the step after that would be…