A Gap of Sky
-by Anna Hope

It is in the youth you construct your final identity. This can be very hard to handle for some youngsters. It's important to find a balance between the society's and family's expectations and your own hunger for freedom and dislodgement.

This short story by Anna Hope is about Ellie, a nineteen-year-old girl who lives in London by herself. She is addicted to drugs, especially coke, but at the same time she is studying at the university. Her life is sort of dual which leads to problems – it's difficult for her to take care of her studies in the daytime and at same partying the entire night and be a drug addict.
We only follow her life about an hour, where she has to buy ink to her printer, but still she is able to go through the entire range of emotions – fear of death, rebelliousness, joy, dejectedness, freedom and so on.

The story begins in medias res with the sentence: “It is dark, but the wrong dark. Something is wrong with the dark.” This creates a very gloomy atmosphere right from the beginning. The description of her waking up with swollen cheeks, drinking water from a pint glass, peeing in the sink etc. gives the impression of a person who is out of her depth and living on the edge. It's plain that she lives a very unhealthy life – she has inflammation of her eyes and her chest is hurting. She only remembers glimpses from the night before, which indicates that she has been very affected by drugs and alcohol, and it appears that it's something she does very often, almost every night.
She is a very diffuse and impulsive person and gets distracted by everything in her surroundings and forgets about her actual purpose. She isn't thinking about the future, she cannot cope with the fact that she doesn't have any. Instead she is living in the moment, only focusing on the small things she has to do, step after step.
It seems like the most important things to her are freedom and not being shackled to anything. Ironically she isn't the free and independent person she wishes to be – her addiction maintains her in her shabby life.
She isn't taking her studies at the university seriously at all - “She thinks of this past year, of university, and it feels like sludge, like thick dark sludge in her brain.”[1] Obviously it's in spite of herself she is doing the course, and as she mentions later in the story, it's her parents that have made her do it.
Her relationship with her parents, especially her mother, is a bit ambivalent. As mentioned before she blames her parents for doing something she doesn't want to. On the other hand she is missing her mother, and she feels that she has taken her love for granted. One could question how her life would turn out, if she didn't even had the university to hold on to.

Anna Hope's narrative technique is rather specific because she doesn't omit any of Ellie's thoughts or acts. This results in the reader gaining insight into her line of thinking and her inner conversations: “She's going to have to work through the night, but it's fine. This is fine. Coke. Does she have any left? Find the wrap, in the bra. The bra, in a tender pile on the floor, curled around her knickers. Yessssss! Clever Ellie...”[2]
The story features a lot of slang and youth style, which makes it more reliable, because the reader gets implemented in her universe.

There are many elaborated descriptions of the city, which can be used as symbols of her life. At one point she suddenly notices something in the sky: “..as she turns there is a gap of the sky to her right, an emptiness, a vacancy that she doesn't remember seeing before, something destroyed, or being built. She turns away, away, and hurries down trough Covent Garden...”[3]
She realises that her life is as empty as the gap in the sky. Something is missing and she fills out this gap with drugs, alcohol and parties but it's only a temporary solution and a way to escape. The fact that she hurries away from this gap just emphasises that she won't face facts.
When she is walking through the city, it's almost described as a maze she has to complete – this can be compared to her searching for identity.
At another point she observes a black leather glove: “its middle finger raised up to the sky in a glorious salute. A volt of naughtiness passes trough her. Life seems, suddenly, filled with possibility....for what, really, was there to be reverent to?”[4]
Like the glove she is giving the finger to the society's expectations and rules. She wont succumb the pressure and be reverent to anything.

I don't think she has solved any of her problems in the end of the story, although she has had some visions in her urban walk. Even though she says that she will never do coke again, I don't believe her. She isn't able to fill out the huge and empty gap in her life by herself without using drugs or alcohol. The gap needs to be filled out with the true values in life, and as her life is right now, there's no one to do that.