A clinging black dress covered in flowers – purple, green and golden flowers; a blue satchel she paid a dollar for; worn-out black shoes that someone else once walked in; a green cardigan with a hole in the shoulder where her perfume still clings; a torn page from an essay where a Professor’s scrawl fades; a tiny golden pendant in the shape of a flower, found at a market; a painted notebook, all watercolours and scribbles; an anklet that jangles as she walks; a boxful of books, well-leafed and full of confused inky notes; and finally, pictures, attempts at capturing moments and people ever-gone.

She was continually searching for a place where she didn’t feel out of place, out of time and out of tune until she fell upon one of these items, and then she smiled, content. For she could never find happiness in the imperfect, inharmonious and savage outside world, only in her own musings which she could shape and structure on her whims, or in inanimate objects to which she could attribute any traits she wished. The only people who touched her at all were characters in books, whom she could perceive any way she pleased, whose image she could mold this way and that, and whom she could silence with a brush of her palm whenever they didn’t say the right words. And of course, there were the people in pictures and behind notes, mere fragments of entire beings, the fragments she liked best, and had chosen from the haphazard pile thrown her way every day. They weren’t really people, only parts, but her desire to believe that those parts were whole was enough to sustain them as complete in her memory. And so if it ever seemed that she loved anyone, all she really loved was that carefully selected and preserved memory of an aspect of their being, tailored to her preferences.

Some will say that it’s unhealthy to sustain oneself on memories and imagination. You’re evading reality, you’re not facing the inevitable, you’re running, you’re escaping, you’re putting life on hold – she’s heard every criticism and every warning. But is her reality any less life-like than yours? If she seeks refuge in clothes and books and furniture which imagination and experience whisper character, stories, and even life into, is it less of a refuge than the friends and lovers you seek out to while away the loneliness of the early hours of the morning? And if she prefers conversing with the dead in her head, if she prefers staring at the faces in the snapshots that today are wrinkled, weathered and worn, and building cherished characters around them to populate her nights, is she any worse than you, who cling to relationships no longer in bloom, still seeing a face as it was ten years ago, and refusing to acknowledge that neither of you can hear each other anymore?

Is she any worse than you, if unlike you, she admits what you know, admits that nothing remains, that almost as soon as a moment is born it dies, that those people in pictures no longer exist but in memory? Is she any worse than you, if unlike you, she admits that she’s terrified of losing the love and happiness sealed into those moments, and tries to seal those feelings into the relics of those times? And is she really any worse than you, if she seeks to keep all that is exquisite that she has tasted, and re-live it, unconcerned with the mundane, the morphing and the ugly? She doesn’t think so, as she sits by the river in that flower-covered dress, making marks in a new-found treasure of a book, and picking up a blank leaf to colour with her voice.