A gap of sky

A gap of sky
We are free to choose our own destiny. Or are we? Especially as a teenager you search for answers to everything. Nowadays, young people are exposed to an insane amount of pressure. The expectations are higher than ever. You have to wear the right clothes, be fit and have lots of friends, and on top of all this, get a long education. It is no wonder many young people want to get away once in a while and try to forget about all the pressure and how they want to live their life. In the short story “A gap of sky” written by Anna Hope in 2008, the main character Ellie is roaming around in the streets of London and in her own mind as well. Her walk around London’s streets becomes a walk through her own mind.
The text is told from a third person narrator and from the nineteen year old main character Ellie’s point of view. The short story is told with a stream of consciousness technique which gives the reader an insight of Ellies mind. The story is full of bad language and swearwords, rhetorical questions and incoherence for example, “Fuck”, “Jesus” and “what, really, was there to be reverent to? To whom? To what? To why? To god? To mum? To dad?”. But durin the story these questions goes away, which is probably because of the clarity, power and strength that Ellie gains through the story. Also it tells us how Ellie normally speak. The use of stream of consciousness also demonstrates what Ellie is like when she does drugs, “Nice, now. Coffee. Swill out cafetiére, fill it. Computer. Is on, Fags… Student shop. She could always score some more, too; see if Jez is about. Good plan […] Anything else? Of course: printer, printer’s out of ink”. It´s nearly impossible for the reader to get a hang of what she is talking about.
Ellie does drugs, drinks and wakes up in the middle of the day, barely remembering the night before. She is addicted to drugs and drugs are one of the first things coming to her mind as she wakes up. Also she seems very slovenly as she wakes up with her make-up from the night before and decides that the collegial-hall is too cold to get into and instead of going to the bathroom, she pees in the sink. One of the reasons why this particular morning is so critic is that she has an assignment Virginia Wolf due for the next day. And since she already have skipped the assignment once, and unless she wants to get kicked out of school she has to get is done for Monday morning. So from the beginning of the story, we face the hard facts of a young woman who skips assignments, does drugs and is lost in life.
Ellie is as far from sober as she could be, and the big city itself is a jungle of distraction to her unfocused mind. But she has a mission, a purpose, and she moves through the streets beside other Londoners with a mission. It makes her feel like a functioning part in greater machinery. The city setting and the descriptions of Ellie’s walk through London plays an important role in the short story. The reader follows Ellie’s walk around London on a map because of the precise and detailed descriptions of the roads and the places she visits. She decides to go out and get some printer ink, so she can write the essay and hand it in time. But the shop is closed, so she starts reconsidering whether she should write the essay or not, but the thought of her being kicked off the school scares her and gives her some motivation to do the essay and she decides to search for ink another place. This doesn’t last long. Soon she sees a leather glove hanging on an iron railing. The middle finger of the glove is raised and she touches the finger. As she touches the middle finger she changes her mind about the essay and suddenly she doesn’t want to write it anymore. This finger made her feel free and that she has the freedom to do whatever she wants. Instead she follows two men into the British Museum. In the museum there is an exhibition of pills with a text to match saying Living or Dying. The exhibition brings Ellie a painful headache and she feels like she’s dying. She realize that she doesn’t want to die, but wants to live and dig to the core of life, “Only living, and if that was sometimes a little extreme, well, how should life be lived? That was the way she wished it, to dig, to the core”.
She enters a shop that offers stones with protective force; she remembers that her mother once gave her a stone like that. It makes her think about her mother’s love which she has always taken for granted. In the end Ellie thinks about all the impressions of the afternoon and gets a feeling of en omnipresent love that loop between everyone she meets, “it is filled with people, and everyone, everyone Ellie sees has the same substance within them, around them, connecting the, looping between them in great bonds of love”.
She suddenly feels a stream of love going out from all the people surrounding her. The short story is called “A gap of sky” and this is exactly what Ellie gets. At one place in the city, there is an opening to the sky, and Ellie is able to see the sky in a place she has never seen it before. Figuratively speaking this means that she is able to see into something greater than what she has been able to before. Ellie recognizes existential questions of life and ends up choosing to finish her assignment because that is the right thing to do. Therefore Ellie’s journey around the city has also been a journey within herself. Facing the questions of freedom, death, life and love has taught her to make the right choice.