3 Sentence Ficathon

For a long time after they're gone--and she's all alone--she doesn't belong anywhere to anyone or anything. She'd spent so many years giving herself to every passing, fleeting fancy and fad as if this were the last moment before the world went away, when she knew in her buried heart that truly this was a world of shadows and the real world waited elsewhere.

But alone now--all alone now--she goes gathering up what she's given away here and left behind there, until, finally, she's all gathered up again--vivid and bright and shining in her hands like nothing else in this world of shadows can. And when she embraces it, brings it closes, her missing self, she can see them; and knows she will see them again.