Ai I

The Woman Who Had Everything

There once was a woman who had everything.

Not metaphorically—literally.

She had everything.

Her name was spoken in marble corridors and shouted through market streets. She owned homes on every continent, and all of them had views of water. Time seemed to slow when she entered a room. People didn’t fall in love with her; they surrendered.

She spoke with an eloquence that felt both ancient and inevitable, as if her words had already been said in some forgotten gospel. She walked with grace not learned but inherited, like the earth itself bent slightly to her rhythm. When she laughed, birds migrated in her direction.

But no one ever asked if she was happy.

And if they had, she would have smiled. Because she was always smiling. The smile was part of the costume.

She had a husband of immense patience and sculpted features. Her children were golden—flawless, polite, precocious, grateful. Her life moved with such polish and pace that nothing ever startled it. Every second was smooth. Every surface glowed. Her calendar was curated like an art museum.

One Tuesday evening, she boarded a train like any other. She was wearing a coat the colour of melted pearls. She had come from a gallery opening, or a climate summit, or a private concert—she couldn’t remember which. The days blurred now, like brushstrokes.

She sat beside the window, resting her forehead against the cool glass.

And then, she began to cry.

It was sudden. Involuntary. Her breath caught in her throat, and she wept as though she had never done it before. The tears came so fast and so full that they shocked her—salt flooding her lips, her chin trembling with every inhale.

No one said a word.

Other passengers pretended to look elsewhere. But their silence was loud, and she felt every second of it pressing in. Her fingers gripped a plastic fork still sticky with mashed potatoes from a container she’d brought and forgotten to eat. She’d never mashed potatoes in her life.

She wanted something to break.

Something sharp. Something wrong.

She wanted a slammed door. A shouted obscenity. A drink spilled in rage.

She wanted her hair pulled and her ego torn.

She wanted to be disrespected. Not violated—but confronted. Dared.

She was starving for the thing she had never tasted: disorder.

And then she saw him.

On the platform.

A man.

Or perhaps not a man at all—but a figure. Shimmering slightly in the orange light of the station. He stood absolutely still. Not watching her, not beckoning—just there. Like the idea of someone, imagined perfectly enough to exist.

He looked… ordinary. Which was how she knew.

The doors never opened. The train moved on. He disappeared.

But something inside her had shifted.

That night, back in her museum-house, she went through the motions. She kissed her children goodnight and listened to her husband tell a story about rainfall statistics. She nodded. Smiled. Drank a little wine. Her body floated through the routine like a leaf in a still lake.

But her mind was on fire.

At midnight, she left.

She left without a note, without keys, without shoes.

Just the pearl coat, and the cry still echoing in her chest.

The garden outside her home was known to bloom out of season, though no one had ever tended it. Tonight, the trees whispered like old friends. The moon hung low, golden and close, like it was eavesdropping.

And beneath the oldest tree—a tree no one remembered planting—stood the man.

“You came,” he said.

“I didn’t know I would,” she replied.

He stepped forward. She stepped forward.

They did not kiss. They did not speak again.

Instead, she reached out and touched his chest. And when she did, the stars flickered. A wind rose from nowhere, carrying the scent of oranges and gunpowder. Her name fell out of her mouth like a coin in a fountain.

The earth opened beneath them—not a crack, not a chasm, but a folding, like pages turning back in a story. They stepped through.

The next morning, the house was quiet.

The children rose, dressed themselves. Her husband brewed coffee and drank it without noticing the silence. The world continued its pirouette. But there was a strange hollowness, as though the air had lost pressure.

She was never found. There was no search.

People like her do not go missing—they recede.

Some say she dissolved into the garden, and that on windless nights, you can hear laughter in the hedge. Others claim she became the tree, or the wind in the tree. Some say she never existed at all.

But if you walk past her house on a Tuesday, just as midnight turns its key in the dark, you might feel something tugging at your sleeve.

Not sadness.

Not even longing.

But the memory of something wild—

something alive—

and the strange, defiant joy