She was afraid of life. It was that simple. Her fear had stunted her, crippled her, cut her off at the knees and left her half a person, an invalid wary of human contact, shunning closeness and intimacy, avoiding love or simple friendship. So she'd learned to live through books and videocassette movies and crappy TV shows, which offered an escape of sorts—but she knew they were an escape to nowhere, a dead end.
For the most part she could brush aside that knowledge and go on sleepwalking through her days; but sometimes, late at night, when darkness had fallen like a hush over the earth and she lay awake, unable to sleep, in an apartment that had become a cage of shadows, her mind turned restlessly to the life she wasn't living, the chances left untaken and the things left undone, the years of her youth passing by, never to be hers again.
