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I walked through Waterlow Park in the crisp morning mist. My bare feet touched cold morning dew, frozen white and grey like my dress that clung tattered and clear to my legs. I caressed the purple petals of flowers that hung heavy and let my fingers run delicately over their smooth skin, feeling their softness and trying to pull that sensation into my self. Bright red splashes spilled from my body and stained the ground where I trod. Black smudges and marks on a fruit that had been dropped and smashed. A fenced in pond shimmered, tiny ripples danced over its surface and I laughed despite myself. I crouched down by its side and rested my hand on its freezing surface. I whispered sweet lullabies to it and asked for it to dissolve my own turbulent waves into its shiny black surface. As I awaited its response I felt the sudden wet nose of a dog pressing into the back of my neck and I ran from that place screaming, hair and skin trailing behind me.

A hard bench, wrought iron and prickly wooden slats, where I found myself collapsed and weeping. It could have been the view, at the bottom of a valley, bare but for a single tree run through with rot. Coming apart from the inside. Infected by invisible parasites violently placed to strip away the leaves and bark so all that's left is a husk, good for the fire. I wept then for things lost. For terrible knowledge. For unsolicited feelings that filled my chest and made my limbs ache. I hoped to find a feeling or a word. I hoped to find despair but knew that I was now too numb for the privilege.

A mother came past, pushing a baby in a pram. I fell to my knees before the child and started to babble to her about truth and pain and existence and brutality and the strangeness of others and purity and innocence and she looked at me with beautiful wide eyes, a light, clear, impossible blue, and I saw her smile at hearing of all the horrors that awaited her until her mother came from round the back of the pram and pushed me away so I fell back on to the grass and a great spurt of blood erupted from me and the baby burst into tears and the mother stared at me, sickened, as I giggled and started rubbing my arms and legs back and forth against the grass, like you do when you make snow angels, and I hummed and sang nonsense rhymes to myself and to the world and I rubbed my head back and forth and remembered the last time I had lain like this and then I stopped frozen staring into nothing, my lips pouted just so slightly, my features frozen, while the mother asked if I was OK and I rolled over on to my front and slept.

When I awoke the Sun had burned away the mist and the park was too full of people. Joggers, walkers, parents and lovers, too many normal people for me to see and I knew my time there was done. I stumbled up the hill and along the grass towards an exit, taking to care not to walk on the paths. The adrenaline that had kept me initially afloat was seeping out with my blood, so now I shivered constantly. The tears on my cheeks were dried and frozen. Scarlet blood still dripped. A howl at a look of concern. Hands up and tearing at a sympathetic arm as I slipped and fell. Strangers all of them, no one left in the world who would know who I am or recognise me. Hundreds. Thousands. Miles away. Choking at the fingers of ghosts around my neck, flinching at sensations of pressing and stretching.

I emerged on to the street and joined the tide of people taking care to ignore each other. I knew where I was headed. I'd read of its beauty and macabre nature in the travel guide of London I'd been handed on the boat. Uphill all the way, my legs empty, sucking the last bit of essence my heart still had in it, trying to tell myself that it would be worth it, as if all the hope hadn't been squeezed and stamped out already. Across roads, stepping out blindly, cars screeching, horns blaring, people shouting, and all I could do was keep my head down and hold the last fragments of my dress around my shoulders and mumble incoherent prayers, the kind my mother would chant to me every night, and felt the sore heaving in my throat as I sobbed my last. Until finally a bridge and beneath it, in all its splendour, the city of London. Where I had been bought. Of my own free will, I could hardly remember. The city I had always dreamed of. And this infamous bridge. I stood on its railings, felt their sympathetic chill under my curled toes. Then I tipped back, threw my head up to the heavens, and fell towards peace. The papers called me the Ophelia of Highgate. If only they knew.