Work Text:
She bundles essentials into a backpack. Soon, it’ll be decorated with badges of the places she’s travelled and the new things she’s found to love.
Quietly and without fuss, she had quit her job, given her landlady notice, and donated trinkets that no longer brought her joy to those for whom they surely will.
Others say she’s living in a dreamworld. How can she expect her life to change in any meaningful way, that she’ll learn anything from abandoning security in search of vague experience? They beg her to stay in her comfort zone as they do, where they wait for the sun to find them, accepting the shadow as part of it.
There has always been a path, the map plotted and safe to traverse. Now, there’s a precipice, but the fall holds no terror. The terror, she’d found, was in standing still, in becoming too rooted in bedrock to believe there’s nourishment beyond.
She locks the door to her apartment and pushes the key through the letterbox.
Yes, she could fail, but isn’t failure where knowledge is found? She might regret also, but she’d rather regret doing than not doing.
Restarting from zero, she takes her first step.