ali(v/c)e

Was she only seven, that Alice, when she fell down the hole?

Perhaps that is why her screams gurgled forth imbued with curiosity.

“Drink me,” said a mystery.

So, she did.

She was okay in the end.

It was we who were left to wonder:

Did she return to reality?

Or, for a moment, had she truly woken up?

So it was with me, as I stepped out of the fog.

I knew that something was changing.

I knew not where the path would lead,

but the path nonetheless was ...

intriguing.

Sure, the changes didn’t come with “eat me” labels,

but eat them up I did.

I was satiated, for a time.

I think that’s when nostalgia kicks in.

Why I turned around to face the fog.

Horrors seem tamed through a lens of acknowledgment,

an understanding of who and what we and they are.

The scariest monsters arise from what we don’t know.

Claws become razors in the dark,

but their costumed truth is unveiled in the light.

Do we leave a fragment of ourselves in the mist?

Evolution means yearning for the new.

For the old, we have to ...

let go.

I think that’s what I was doing,

letting go,

as I stepped backwards into the light.

I could feel the warmth on my neck

as my former self faded into foggy memory.

I know now that the path wasn’t simple.

How my foot,

stepping backwards,

took me over a ledge.

Alice was okay.

She fell for a long time

but learned so much on the way down.

So it was with me.

Gravity was doing its job,

pulling on the weights I hadn’t known were around my neck.

Maybe that is why,

slightly asphyxiated,

I couldn’t see what the seven-year-old could.

The shapes of the bottles

and the inscriptions on the labels

were too much for the gymnastics team inside my head.

Strangest of all were the faces.

An entire orbit around the sun

and we were only just beginning to remove the masks.

The faces beneath,

exposed in a new day,

seemed so foreign,

strange,

fantastical.

A decision each time to open Schrödinger’s box

and calcify

who had been

from whom was to become.

Did they feel the same,

my beloved in-betweens?

Were they wary of what lay beneath my mask?

The straps around my ears held steadfast.

Perhaps it was then,

as I fumbled with the straps,

that I didn’t hear the splash.

I didn’t feel it either.

I just knew that there had been a shift,

watching as my mask floated to its fate.

“Goodbye,” I tried.

The bubbles where words should have been would have to suffice.

I could move about now,

inside the safety of an eternal womb.

“From dust to dust” –

Have we been saying it all wrong?

It is water that brings life.

Sound travels faster in water than in air,

bringing the voices,

with their demands and expectations,

more quickly than they could ever be acknowledged.

What a strange place in which to be,

a silent tomb paradoxically enshrouded in echoes,

while something beckons from the deeper blue.

We weren’t made to hold our breath underwater.

Yet we reward those who make it work,

while their heads are held beneath the surface

by those who set the standards

for what it means to be “good” –

good at getting the job done,

good at providing in and out of love,

good at surviving in a machine

so worn down

that the cogs have rusted off

and the gears scrape over the crust of oil

that was never meant to persevere,

struggling to find the strength

to even shout

over the cacophony

a single

word.

“This is life,” they say.

Then they turn the other way.

It was then,

I think,

while thrashing around,

that I understood:

we don’t all make it.

We weren’t built to sink with the promise that we will float.

I wanted out.

I wanted to be ...

me.

But it was then,

as my vision faded,

that I realized how much water

was already inside my lungs.

A wonderland takes courage to traverse.

She was brave, that Alice.

But she, too, had her limits.

Something from the unreality shook her to the core,

sending her back to what she had known.

So it was with me,

as my buoyancy returned,

floating on the waves,

the stars twinkling a message I somehow understood:

“Not yet.”

There is a calm incompatibility with that which I once recognized,

our explanations for orbits and nebulae no longer enough.

To understand the ‘how’ but never the ‘why’.

If only to come together in our uncertainty,

instead of killing one another over who we believe is right.

Alice was okay.

For me I believe that she would want the same.

She was just an idea, but ...

aren’t we all?

I don’t remember being rocked in a chair,

but my cells felt just that,

while being jostled towards a shore.

The ocean,

with its mysteries,

will be there when I am ready to explore.

Alice, after all, found a looking glass.

But,

as the waves receded

and my back slid onto sand,

I couldn’t help but wonder:

Have I returned to reality?

Or, for a moment, had I truly woken up?