The carriage clock on his desk chimed nine. “Your heart-aches, the dreams, memory loss, the peculiar sensation of moths in your lungs can all be attributed to this cause.”

I pinched my cheeks, rolling my tounge around the cavern of mouth. That couldn’t be right, I had been trying so hard not to exist. I had read all the right sort of books, while eating, walking, waiting for the train. I had changed my name at least three times in the last week. I had thought in the third person and past tense. I had even memorised The Jabberwocky until I could recite it backwards.

“A healthy girl of your age,” he continued, I wasn’t listening “ought to be no more real than a silk slip or a corn husk.”

My shoes felt too big all of a sudden. I was gripped by the fear that perhaps I had tried too hard. Tulle, ice, spectacles, fog.. I was forgetting something.

“Not to worry,” his bony hands scrawled something illegible on a yellow pad.

Windows, raindrops, crystal, plastic wrap.. oh, that was it. I had gone through to the other side, like cordial through a gauze sleeve. In unbecoming, I was nothing, and through nothing you can see everything. Everything, more bright and bold and painful than a gasp.

“Take three in the morning and two with your afternoon tea.” the doctor handed over the script.

I thanked him, turned, and walked through the wall.

Noone ever forgives us for changing. They want us to be constant as the wind and always wear the same colours but we’re not meant to be that way. We’re supposed to be a little different each morning when we wake up and I think it’s our dreams that do it. Last night I was a sailor and woke with sand in my sheets and salt in my hair, and the night before that I was a wood nymph who rose with the dawn chorus and dewed lips. Every two years I change alltogether and become someone else wearing the same eyes. It’s a little uncomfortable, like a snake shedding skins. They never forgive me for changing but I do it with passion because you need to die a little bit now and then to feel alive.

(p.s. aren’t these the prettiest flowers? they seem to worship the sky. could you even choose a more perfect name for them than ‘cosmos’?)

Can you see the Ship? He said. The Ghost ship on the sea. It comes so very near some days, it will come one day, for me. I can not see the Ship. I said. Out beyond the waves. But I can see an island blue, where I shall spend my days. When my ship comes in. He said, waiting on a breath. I will live my dreams, you’ll see, and die a hero’s death. There in paradise. I said, my little heart on fire. I’ll find the wishing fruit, bright red, and have all I desire.

She loved too many things, that was her problem, and they didn’t always love her back. Some times they would run away, like the field mouse she kept in her pocket for two whole weeks. Others would slip softly in to the realms of forget-me-so, where ballet shoes and half empty diaries collected dust bunnies and sighs.

What they did not know is that she was seeking true love, the sort you only know when you find. She had to try everything, explore Wonderland until she found the silver slippers that would take her home. All the same, it hurt everytime she let one go.