A Woman With Options

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," Virginia Woolf writes in her incredible and provocative extended essay "A Room of One's Own," which is call to arms on the social and material conditions required for the writing of literature.  Things have not changed much since the publication of the book in 1929.  Women still need financial independence, privacy, and leisure time for growth - and ultimately, to be a woman with options. I like to think that I am a woman with options.  I have a wonderful education, and a room of my own, with room to breathe, and outside that room there is a great, vast world with limitless possibilities.  No room for doubt either.  When I open the window, especially on these cold days, I can almost smell the possibilities.  But as "air" is and does in a non-conspicuous manner, those possibilities, while limitless, are amorphous at the moment, and my "one-pointedness," and devotion to being a woman with options is being tested.  It's an air screw. Pay it no mind.  Keep a single stream of thought, play to the tune, do not dance for nothing. The empty space, while all-consuming and threatening, is rigged for some universal measure that has not been made clear to me yet.  This is just a temporary black hole, not a supermassive one. I guess I just have an "event horizon" on my lap.  Okay, maybe not an "event horizon," that is undetectable with the point of no return, but an "Event" and a "Horizon" on my hands.  The event or physical realities have been difficult and painful, but the horizon is looking good, because it is something that can be attained.  Something good.  Light cannot escape from a black hole which is believed to be created by the collapse of a massive star.  Light will get in here, because I have not collapsed, and I was not anyway a massive star, just a starry-eyed woman that is determined to get her options back and then some.