Perfectly Preserved Envy.

My youth is perfectly preserved in a special wallet within the mind palace of my existence.

Every so often, I open the wallet - frown and grimace at her lovely soft chocolate exterior - my once richly layered lovely young self. Oh, how I have become so envious, when I compare her to my convoluted and annoying mature self.

I fear that I have come face to face with my truth - Life plays tricks and I am but a puppet on its strings.

My thoughts are eclectic...wonderful, bitter, surreal, and even a tad bit intimate sometimes...always in a confrontation with my 'self-as-other', where past, present and regret blur. It honors, defies and challenges my emotional depth and surreal logic.

Simply put - Sometimes, I go searching for the gorgeous ME-self that I have somehow misplaced.

She stares back at me from mirrors, smiling that knowing smile. She knows that deep down - I crave her beauty...but she has stolen and now possesses that which is truly and rightfully mine...

OH! MY LOST AND BEAUTIFUL SUPPLE YOUTHFULNESS. You have so willingly forsaken me?

🪞 Within The Wallet of Youth - the mind-palace contains my Selves - not as a photo or memory, but as a living, breathing girl who appears in mirrors, dreams, and reflections. I both loathe and long for her, a younger me, that is wearing my me... something once sacred...now crumbling into another reality.

The architecture of the palace is a shifting, dreamlike space with locked rooms, echoing corridors, and one forbidden chamber: the one with the wallet. I only visit it during moments of vanity, despair, or regret.

“The wallet is careless and cruel with my emotions. Inside it, she sleeps, cradling my lost youth - folded like a secret, smelling of cocoa butter and childish rebellion.”

Every time that I have the need to open the wallet, the girl appears in the mirror. She doesn’t speak, but her smile is unbearable - too knowing, too soft, too smug. I feel rage, jealousy, and grief, every single time.

“She smiles like she knows the ending. Like she’s already lived it and I’m just catching up. How can that be”

Yet, What Was The Original Theft...

Sometimes, I suspect that the me-girl is not just a thief of time - she’s a secret that I missed while planning my arrival. She’s stolen my time, my suppleness, and my many lost possibilities. I do confess, that I have tried to trap her, bargain with her. I have even tried to destroy the wallet - but the girl always returns.

“I burned the wallet once. She laughed from the mirror, her skin glowing with the firelight. ‘You think I live in that?’ she whispered. ‘I live in you. You cannot burn me without burning yourself.’

Insolent - Damnable creature.

There has to be a Reckoning 🪞

Eventually, this narrator realizes that the girl isn’t her youth - she’s her shadow. Not what was lost, but what was denied. The beauty she loathed was never stolen - it had always been hers, just unclaimed. The wallet was never a prison. It was the mirrored reflection.

“She never aged because I never let her live. I preserved her, yes - but only so I could despise her safely.”

The Released understanding frees me from my sad contemplation.

The narrator opens the wallet one last time. Instead of grimacing, she touches the girl’s face. The mirror shatters. The girl steps out. The narrator steps back...Horrified - "I can never go back, time does not wait, it advances".

The girl smiles, and now she advances as I retreat. Finally, I am unable to escape. We merge.

“She walks into my me like a possession returning home. And for the first time in a long time, I feel beautiful again- not because I am young, but because I am become whole.”

🪞 And now I keep The Parable of the Wallet-Girl written upon my wall.

There once was a woman who preserved her youth

in a velvet wallet

hidden deep within the mind palace of her existence.

She did not carry it in her purse, nor wear it around her neck.

She kept it locked in a room with no windows,

where time could not breathe.

Every so often, she would descend the spiral stairs of memory,

open the wallet, and there she was - the girl.

Soft chocolate skin, supple and smug,

smiling from the mirror with that unbearable grace

that only the young possess without knowing.

The woman would frown.

She would grimace.

She would whisper curses

that carved cracks in her psyche.

“You stole it,” she’d say.

“You wear what is mine.”

But the girl never answered.

She only smiled, as if she knew

that beauty cannot be stolen -

only abandoned.

The woman tried to burn the wallet.

She tried to drown it in tears.

She tried to forget the room.

But the girl returned

each time she looked in the mirror

and saw not herself,

but the echo of what she refused to let go.

And so the woman aged.

And the girl remained.

Not because she was preserved,

but because she was never claimed.

Until one day,

the woman touched the mirror

softly, without rage, with a gentle reverence.

And the girl stepped out.

She was never there to haunt, but to heal.

They merged - youth and maturity - accepting

embracing wholeness.

And the wallet, now empty,

became a window.

Waiting for the next narration.

🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞