Year One: Month One

Alyssa opened her eyes. Then, she blinked a couple of times. She sat up. She was in a large meadow. At least, it looked like a meadow. It could have been a field. She didn’t know the official difference. She looked more closely at the landscape around her, before she realised with a start where she was. She was somehow back at Bleak Wood Nature Reserve - the wooded area just beyond the University of Kent that she loved to explore. She turned where she sat and looked behind her. There was her beloved university college building: Keynes College. Slowly, she got to her feet and approached the building.

As she approached the building, she noticed something strange - nobody was around. There were no footsteps along the corridors, or voices that she could hear from outside. Peeks into various lecture rooms only showed emptiness. She entered the building and still all she heard was silence. It was… unsettling. At the very least, she should have been able to smell the stomach-turning scent of weed that people smoked right outside the building.

Confused, Alyssa walked through the building and the room which she occupied was exactly as she had last left it. Her hamper was half-full of clothes that needed washing, her walls decorated with various decals and posters, and her desk was cluttered with papers and pens. She backed out of her room, the area too familiarly unfamiliar for her to inhabit.

As she wandered through the college, occassionally looking into lecture theatres or bathrooms, she wished for a place to live - one straight out of those storybooks she loved to read. As she wandered, she imagined. The house she fantasised living in had a thatched roof and had only four rooms spread out on two floors. The living room she imagined to have a comfortable reading nook and a high window with a ledge wide enough for her to sit comfortably. The kitchen would be fancy, even though she didn’t really know how to make many different meals. She also imagined a bedroom with a light and airy feel. She imagined both the living room and the bedroom covered in bookshelves. The bathroom was clearly necessary because… well, hygiene.

When she exited the college, she was surprised to notice a fantastic English storybook house just sitting on the field before the nature reserve began. She looked around, as if to spy someone with building equipment scurrying away, but to no avail. Instead, she saw more grass and greenery. Cautiously, she approached the house - vaguely noting the thatched room - and opened the latchkey door. Once inside, all she could do was gasp. The interior of the house was exactly as she had fantasised. The walls were covered in bookshelves, which were overflowing with all the books Alyssa had ever read and liked. One such book caught her eye. It was her absolute favourite and she carefully pulled at its spine to free it from the bookshelf. ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ was embossed in silver on the pale blue cover. Alyssa had read the book so many times that she had practically memorised the story.

Leafing through the familiar pages, she decided to sit in her reading nook and re-read the two books that had let her sail through her childhood.

‘Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'’

And so it began.