The Girl Who Changed Everything

It started on a Monday at lunchtime. The Girl Who Changed Everything opened her fridge and contemplated the brie and onion marmalade that she usually ate for lunch. The brie looked runny, as if it had been lying around waiting for her for far too long and had become a little soft in the head. The onion marmalade had lost its lustre.

She thought she would try the taleggio cheese instead. It look more appealing, more manly. It was a little bit stinky, but she could overlook that because it was such a creamy mouth-filling cheese. She liked the look of the tomato chilli jam, how it’s redness crammed the jar and shouted at her: eat me, eat me.

When she opened the bread bin, the rye bread (that she liked to toast) was sitting there, unashamedly naked, waiting for her. It was a bit off-putting. So she reached behind the rye bread, being careful not to touch any part of it, and grabbed what she thought was a nice crusty farm loaf. It turned out to be a seed loaf, but she wasn’t going back into the bread bin where the rye bread was lying in abject neediness, so seed loaf it was.

She was mildly surprised at how much she had enjoyed her new lunch that she vowed never to eat it again. In fact she vowed that every meal would be a gastronomic experience of new tastes , flavours and textures.

She realised that she would have to go shopping for more food. She had planned vegetable soup for supper with rye crackers and green olive tapenade and smoked mozzarella cheese, and an apple for dessert. She had eaten the same menu the night before, although she had had a pear.

The Girl Who Changed Everything worked from home, so in the middle of the day she was still wearing her pyjamas and dressing gown and slippers. As she stood contemplating what she would wear to go out shopping she realised that nothing in her cupboard appealed to her. She liked what she was wearing, thank you very much, and so she went out in her pyjamas and dressing gown and slippers.

It was raining outside so she didn’t take an umbrella. She jumped into puddles, twirled around lampposts, sang out loud, startled little children by shouting boo! in their faces. She smacked an old lady and knocked down a business man in a suit. She liked all the changes that she was making so much that she walked past the grocery store in which she ordinarily shopped.

She realised that she could never go home again. It would seem too mundane, too routine, and so she carried on jumping over puddles, banging on shop windows, scratching cars with her keys, ignoring green traffic lights.

Language had started to become a problem. She realised that she couldn’t use the same word twice and she soon ran out of words that she could use. She made up new words but no-one understood what she was trying to say.

Walking also became a problem. Every step had to be different so she: hopped, skipped, jumped, twisted, pranced, danced, bounced, and got quite exhausted with the all the changes.

The Girl Who Changed Everything noticed that, somehow, she was standing outside her own front door and she still had her keys clutched in her hand.

It wouldn’t harm she thought to go inside and have a nice warm bath and a cup of hot chocolate. Afterwards she put on clean pyjamas and curled up on the couch with a book. For supper she had vegetable soup with rye crackers and green olive tapenade and smoked mozzarella cheese, and an apple for dessert.

She was mildly surprised at how comforted she felt after the meal, that she vowed she would eat it again. Maybe not every night but at least three times a week.

Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash