Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home.

Joyce, Ulysses

T’was the night before Christmas,
It was dark and cold and dreary.
Coal fires were alight on a cold, black night
For lettered, and unlettered, alike

The young woman broke free from the asylum
suffering from stress, post natal depression, 
and an untold, fearful anxiety

Fearing the roaring of the skies, she sought her disguise
In gin and laudanum, trembling at the dying of the light;
Fear seeped up from the miasmic ground.
Wind and the rain hailed all around.

Scurrying through the lanes and fields
There was a thunder in the air.
She vowed she’d be good, live plain,
Begin to care, live anywhere.

Annie dare not turn, 
She dared not breathe nor stare, in case
She missed her fatal footfall,
then the shrieking keeper would appal
her and her shroud'd fall loose.

Stumbling past the graveyard
A bolt of lightning split the tree in three, 
Sent her tumbling,
Stumbling wildly, fearing goblin, ghost and me.

The devil was on a spree.
In the morning her long hazel hair was white,
As white as white can be ……and she….just twenty-three.