I worry about my girl.
I worry about the mysterious sadness that envelopes her like an old woolen blanket late at night. It shrouds her as she huddles in the armchair by the fire, wrapping itself so tightly around her that it squeezes silent tears from her eyes as she stares deep into the coals, seeing an old memory of pain flickering within.
I worry about her health. She doesn't eat enough and when she does it isn't wholesome food, just prepared meals from a tin made in a factory, so saturated with preservatives and chemicals that its noisome odour burns my eyes. I didn't used to be sensitive to such things, but I am now.
I worry about her state of mind as she struggles to write her latest novel.
She sits at the small desk in the sitting room, fingers playing at their rhythm as she stitches letters into sentences on her small machine. It is green and comes with its own little house. Yet each time she performs this literary ritual I watch the worry line appear as her brows knit and the lines she sews begin to unravel until her fingers falter and the machine grows silent. Her words become unwanted artifacts as she reads what she has written and the dissatisfaction is plain on her face.
She's written seven novels, I've seen them in the bookcase in the corner of the sitting room instead of amongst my books in the grand library. She doesn't think her books are good enough to stand beside Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, and Brontë. Yet writing a book is a monumental thing for any human being, and she has done it seven times before.
I think she has forgotten that.
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