L’évasion

  She sits perched at the old wooden writing desk, gazing out the window onto the picturesque French countryside. Sunlight is falling in streaks through the grain in the fields opposite the hill she sits atop, her shuttered window, tucked beneath a peak of the vaulted roof, flung open towards the setting sun. The summer air is warm and still. The view she thought idyllic when she arrived a mere month prior seems hollow and isolating now. It is beautiful, but it is all far away. Too far. 

  The little room smells like rose water and soap and old linen. The country house seemed extravagantly quaint before it became a prison. Fear now creeps through every hallway, over every floorboard and tapestry, through every useless keyhole. She hears a shape move at the bottom of the steep staircase and silently inches her piled suitcases closer against her side of the door.

And then what

… she thinks, staring at them helplessly. Turning back to the empty page in front of her she closes the red leather cover of her journal, glances at the drawer in the side table where it had resided, and chooses to rather slip it into her pillowcase instead.

Not long

she promises the pages,

not long.

It's been six years, today. 

Sometimes it feels like forever. And sometimes it feels not long...