I rolled out of bed, feeling distinctly undignified as I let my feet settle onto the threadbare carpet. The bedsheets beckoned for my return with the remnant of body heat, but a feverish restlessness propelled me into the chilled air of my quarters with nothing more than my dressing gown, cast aside unceremoniously onto the wooden chair beside my bed two days earlier.

My hair hung limp, barely disturbed despite restless dreams of unscrupulous solicitors and disapproving tutors; I drove my small wooden comb through the wispy strands out of habit more than necessity and pinned it up out of the way. Unfashionable, but it would have to do. The eyes that were reflected back at me in the looking glass were distant and unfocused, as though the mind to which they belonged were still reluctantly engaged in Morpheus’ grip.

I’d slept barely three hours after thirty hours of waking, much of it spent grappling with academic material as bland as it was pedantic. Though it had been barely dusk when I awoke for the first time, I had been rather more interested in disappearing into unconsciousness for another spell than in indulging the pangs of hunger that were beginning to throb gently in my belly.

Instead, my eyes had fallen on a volume sitting on my bedside table…an old favourite that I hadn’t revisited in some time, discovered serendipitously in a friend’s attic weeks before.

I never was able to resist the allure of words when the opportunity presented itself. By the time my eyes protested from the continued strain of reading by the dying daylight, I was surprised to find myself two-thirds through the tale, and mentally relaxed, if physically still exhausted. 

I scrutinized the face opposite mine in the mirror, then, wondering what the heroes and heroines of my ignominious novels would have made of me. For a moment I fancied that my shoulders possessed something of the feline grace that was often alluded to in this particular volume; I rolled my shoulders back self-consciously, not realizing till a moment later that I had done so. I even imagined that my eyes, weary in the way only a young person’s eyes could be, betrayed a hint of the sharply honed analytical skills that I had come to admire so, even as I acknowledged internally that the feats of deduction that amazed secondary characters and readers alike would have been impossible—improbable—in the unforgiving solidity of the real world.

The moment passed, and I was, once again, myself, or as much myself as a young twenty-something set free from the strictures of filial obligations for the first time could be.