Living the Tale

Often I find myself on foggy roads with too many arrows pointing in too many directions. The signposts are too vague to make out, and I am lost in the sea of ideas and possibilities. "Which way should I go?" I wonder, rocking on my heels. Many hands are pulling me in several directions, some blocking my eyes, others tugging my wrists. To sort myself from the midst of the mayhem, I remind myself of a story.

The story begins with a tiny child peering over the edge of the dinner table, fascinated with food. It wasn’t any obsession with her own eating habits—after all, she was devilishly picky—but rather a love for the substance, a great interest in the act of eating and drinking itself. She would endlessly flip through her mother’s cookbooks, poring over the glossy shots of rice, beef, pastries, with the starry-eyed wonder that other children reserved for their first trip to the zoo. If there was something that could unlock her world, it was food: cakes and sparkling liquids set up prettily on a glass table, glorious feasts heavily laid on tables that stretched for miles.

That, of course, would be provided in abundance. The residents of Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land were lavish in their edible imagery: from the very beginning Alice would be steeped in potions that tasted of cherry pie, pineapples, and custard; she would nibble on cakes that would make her rise to the ceiling; she would ponder over how different flavors could affect one’s personality. A great feast would be thrown in her honor, with throngs of baffling guests drinking her health, and she would meet fabulous beasts made of buttered bread and sugar cubes. Wonderland was very generous to the food-loving reader, who basked in the glory of meeting a protagonist who also was very interested in matters of eating and drinking and therefore made her adventures so much easier to follow. Already, since the very beginning, Alice strikes a chord within a very young me.

The story continues with a confused girl, unsure of what to do with her changing body and mind, constantly checking herself before the mirror to see if she is the “right size”. Legs too fat! Tummy too chubby! Head too big for her shoulders! Thoughts crammed her head and came out in jumbles, eliciting shakes of the head and a hundred retierations of “that can’t be right”; others downright accused her of making things up, of being an insincere phoney. The awkward girl would then recede in her corner from the rest of the world, to bury herself in her books.

Meanwhile in Wonderland Alice would grow, shrink, bump her head on the ceiling and shut herself up like a telescope, get screamed at by a furious bird and have a caterpillar disapprovingly tell her that her words are “all wrong”. “I can’t explain myself, sir, for I’m not myself, you see,” she tells him, and the reader ponders the meaning of those words: “Am I myself? Was I the same person that I was when I woke up this morning? Will I ever be the right size, will my words ever sort out?” As Alice flails helplessly, her body stuck in a house far too small for her, the reader dreams of bursting the roof off and stomping away into Wonderland Woods, or gleefully fleeing the house in search of size-altering mushrooms which will help her fit in.

The story ends, for now, with a girl on her bed, tossing and turning, her head buzzing with questions. The older she grows the more she realizes that there is so much more to learn—but will she ever learn it all? How fascinating everything is! Even the night before she had spent hours chasing down an elusive problem down a hole, only to see the solution disappear around a corner; tomorrow would be another day to try, but her mind is not yet satisfied. She thinks back to when she was a child, always asking “What’s that? What’s that?” Now, there is less time to ask questions, but she can still wonder about everything, create stories in her mind.

And Alice? Eternally youthful in Looking-Glass Land, immortalized in literature, she continues to carry heavy volumes of text to Humpty Dumpty for him to explain; she chases rabbits into Wonderland, burning with curiosity; “But why?” she continues to ask the residents of her fantasy-land, who may or may not have coherent solutions to her problems but will always be there to answer them. Time to open doors, solve riddles, ask questions! Alice is no longer a flattened figure in my picture-books—she lives within me, has lived with me for as long as I remember. Every year that I have lived, her tale offers me something more. And through her many relatable misadventures, I have also lived through Alice’s experiences, and if there is one thing I have learned from the story, it’s that for now, it "doesn't really matter which way I go--as long as I get somewhere". I just need to take the first step.