She would live in some other, contrary fashion. She would be free to do as she pleased. She might become another sort of person entirely: make friends with a one-legged ex-fireman, set up her own pie-making business, cut off her hair and take up her skirts, draw and paint and learn the bassoon, take a lover to whom she might feed ripe strawberries and climb to the top of a tree in midwinter to gaze at the moon. She saw her life, in that moment, as a sort of fabric laid out before her, to be cut and shaped to her desire. She might choose something else. She might write her own story, for this,
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