...the safecollector..a not so modern tale

Once upon a time in a land where the sun seldom shone, there lived a woman who dreamed of better things. She longed for storybook flowers to bloom outside her window. She yearned for just a tiny glint of something warm to seep into her room, for just one ray to break through the glass. She hoped upon hope for a visitor. But every day was dark, and every night was the same as every day.

As time passed, actions were drowned by thoughts. She ceased bothering to sit at the table or change the linen. She stopped even intending to polish the silver or vacuum the rug. No one ever called. No matter how hard she wished they would.

Then one day, one dark day in January as she sat illuminated by the bright gleaming notes of her favourite song, she had a thought. A new thought. Not one of those ideas that bumps around forever until its corners are worn and its edges tatty, but a sharp pointy thought. 

 ‘Maybe it’s not here.’ 

You see she’d never been beyond.  She came from a family that had never dared. They were safecollectors, generations of them gathering up sameness and security to pad the walls of their lives as the darkness grew around them. And because of that, she too had been no more than a dreamer — an imaginer of otherness for so long that she had become lost to herself.

And so, fearfully, she set forth for the uncertain with only the music in her head to light the way.