Step One: Go Outside

Francie wakes to a half drawn curtain pouring sunlight on her face. Sleepily, she rolls out of bed and pads to the kitchen, skipping around any pools of sunlight streaming in through the slants in the windows. She makes herself a cup of coffee and sits at her writing desk, inhaling the tangy aroma, heady and delicious. She sits with her head nestled in her hands and sifts methodically through her thoughts, watching the spools of steam rise in the air above her cup.

We don’t get much sunshine in Ireland, something deep inside her complains. You should go out and enjoy it. Come on. She shushes the voice and swallows her vitamin D supplements. She has too much work to do.

She writes and writes alone. She is good at that, at writing. Something inside her is always clawing at her to speak, to make worlds and shape stories, so her writing flows freely. Maybe it’s because she spends so much time alone that she feels she knows herself so well, knows all of her edges and corners, recognises each of the little intricacies of her personality, like the smooth crevices of the braid she wears in her long hair. She knows the stories she likes, and it seems that others want to hear them too, because they are snapped up, especially the raunchy ones. She likes those ones the best. 

In the afternoon, Mrs. Kelly knocks at the door and hands her her weekly shopping in a small canvas grocery bag. Francie brings a kitchen chair for Mrs. Kelly to sit on in the hall, and stands not quite in the doorway while her neighbour chats happily about her life, her kids, the town. She used to offer to have Francie over for dinner, “to get you out of the house”, but Francie never accepted, and eventually she stopped asking. Francie listens and laughs at all the right moments, the most attentive of audience members. When Mrs. Kelly has exhausted her gossip, which she wrings out like a cloth being squeezed to the very last drop of water, she takes the chair back inside and waves goodbye. Francie watches her walk across the hall with a deflated feeling in her stomach, like she is watching a train roll away that she has once again refused to board.

In the evening, the sun is still brightly burning. Francie loves the months that creep into summer, when the days stretch out and the light lasts longer. She takes her laptop and stretches out on her window seat, typing stories about the lives of rich women in the city, running around in expensive clothes with designer handbags and purses and steamy personal affairs. She submerges herself into their exciting, vibrant lives as she sits alone on her perch like a budgie in a cage, watching from the outside. 

When the evening comes, the anxiety starts to creep up again, like a rubber band is being wrapped slowly around her lungs. She is not afraid of the dark, but she hates the closing of the day. Another day has passed that she has not tried hard enough, though she tries everything she feels capable of. She exercises vigorously on her treadmill. She receives guests into the home and laughs with them. She makes plans every week to meet a friend for coffee in the tiny café in her building, which is only three floors down from her apartment. Only three floors. She can do it, surely. Step one: go outside.

But she never does. She never leaves. It’s like she has forgotten how. Too much time has passed. She will miss out, she knows this. She knows it because when she thinks about it, she feels a pain in her ribs, a deep, raw ache. The new experiences she will never have, the new people she will never meet. Sometimes she sits and watches the world outside, the tiny people milling about on the street below her window, and then she shuts the curtains and does not open them for days. The cycle repeats itself, and has done for years. 

When she thinks she has mustered the courage, she sometimes makes it to the door before the terror cripples her, and she huddles in a heap on the floor, battling her brain, trying to convince herself that she will be safe outside, nothing will go wrong, but though she fights it, this overpowering fear, it is always in vain. After minutes, or hours, of struggling, she turns away from the door in defeat. 

She cried a lot in the beginning, but less so, now. She tells herself that she values that feeling of safety, that warm hug her bed gives her each time she falls into its embrace, welcoming her home. You’re not safe out there, it seems to whisper, and terror of what might be seizes her, and she knows that outside is a place she can never go. If she could go, she would have gone by now, or at least, that’s what the voice inside Francie whispers to her.

She calls her mother and they chat about life, about her writing and her mother’s pottery-making. They talk about the past a lot; those memories are tinted with the golden light of childhood. But they never talk about how Francie doesn't go outside. Her mother doesn’t extend the invitation to go outside anymore. When they ring off, Francie tells her mother she will see her soon, even though she knows it’s not true. Her mother is too old and weak to visit Francie anymore.

Darkness falls again, just as it does every night, the sky moving in it’s own perfect rhythm. The deepening dusk hugs her close, squeezes her, almost but not quite tightly enough to suffocate her. To stave off the tightness in her chest, she likes to have the windows wide open, cold night air spilling into her lungs as she takes long deep breaths, telling herself tomorrow will be the day. Tomorrow she will be brave. Tomorrow. But not today, she whispers to herself. And that’s OK. That’s OK. That’s OK.