Within or Without
Disclaimer: I do not claim any rights to Alice in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll
I'm writing this small snippet of a story at 3 AM on a random musing I had based on the very first sentence of this story. So, sorry if it's odd and senseless, it's just sort of a… 'what if' scenario, or just musings. Eh, well I hope you like it!
Was Alice in Wonderland, or was Wonderland in her?
It was a question that she herself did not even know the answer to.
There were too many directions, too many fragments on which to walk—Right was wrong and left was right, right?
Right.
She stumbled along the path that led to what she knew was in actuality was the wrong way, but Alice had never believed in actuality; for her, there would always be this, this land of wonder she would fall into when the world got too big for her, the pressures of society—that bitter, constraining thing—held her down and refused to let her go.
The lessons, the manners, the long boring talks about the dull world in which they all existed, the tea parties, the dull, drab social occasions that made her, even as a child still, want to kill herself. Abnormal, wasn't it? Or should she say normal?
Too many choices, but only one escape, one Wonderland. She knew that it did not matter if she took the wrong way now—they all led to the same place, through the strange forests, passed the eccentric tea party and the hookah smoking caterpillar all the way to the end, where she all but lost her head.
Irony was a word young Alice did not yet know of, so it escaped her when ever she heard the Queen yell that infamous line: "Off with her head."
She had already lost her head, hadn't she?
There was no cure, and no one to blame but reality, something she could not hold, could not grasp. Her freedom was the white rabbit, his pure white fur a beacon, a sign for her always to follow and never look back.
Reckless, adventurous, eccentric, freaky…She had heard it all in whispers, and never listened; she was too busy talking to the White Knight and all his clumsiness, too busy, in the very, very end that was not actually the end at all, ruling her kingdom as Queen Alice. Forever to be Queen Alice, stuck between the White Queen and the Red Queen, as the chess sets arranged around her.
Her mind was a canvas, and Wonderland was the result; this beautiful, eccentric world where no one could touch her, where the tyrannical Queen of Hearts ruled her society just as the real society was ruled—mercilessly, cruelly, without an ounce of fun, of creativity. What kind of world—what kind of life—is that?
In the end, Alice always beat her, that oppressive shred of society, that symbol of all the lessons, the parties, the lifeless conversations…
She preferred, actually, speaking to the Mad Hatter—who really was quite mad—over talking to her sister sometimes. And did she feel shame about it?
Alice was lucky—she was still too young to feel such things.
Her imagination fed her, sustained her, and her Wonderland always shifted with it, the odd animals and insects changing forms, the trees varying, the paths longer or shorter or completely absent. But she did not mind—it only made her want to stay in there longer.
She was too young to know what others thought, and too carefree to really give a damn either way. The White Rabbit was hurrying, that piece of freedom that she needed, and in the dark of her room she followed him, falling down the rabbit hole, that daze of pictures and images never quite clear, and coming to the overly small, now polka dotted door at the end of the corridor of stripes and swirls and brilliant colors.
And she smiled, and knew that she was home as she ate the cake and sipped the drink, shrinking to just the right size, as it always should be, and opening that vivid door to her mind with a skip in her step and the White Rabbit—always muttering—in the distance. She would catch him; she always did.
And if anyone wanted to know how Wonderland even started, how such a land came about, well…
Just go ask Alice.
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