through the looking glass

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle."

A simple full-length mirror hung on the back of my childhood bedroom door. Slightly warped, black faux wood frame… and though there was nothing special about this insignificant mirror meant only for fleeting retrospectives, it always held a particular kind of magic to me.

From time to time, I would peer into this mirror and wonder at the life beyond. How same, and yet, how utterly different it all seemed.

I fantasized about what might exist just out of sight from the narrowly visible section of reversed room.

Someone once told me that most of how we construct our lives is based on assumption. Even the idea that, every day, opening your bedroom door and finding the rest of your house as expected is an assumption. Who’s to say that it isn’t just as infinitely probable that you open your door and find a yet unimaginable other awaiting your arrival on the other side?

I clung to that possibility with childish certainty, that one day I might open my bedroom door and fall down the rabbit hole.

Like my favorite childhood book, Alice, Through the Looking Glass, I would gaze into that mirror and imagine if I wished hard enough, the solid, reflective divide between me and that mysterious other life would dissolve into mist, permitting me to step into its uncharted depths. Beckoning me to come see for myself what splendors it held.

“Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—”

-Alice, Through the Looking Glass

I imagined that everything awaited me on the other side of that enchanting silver portal.

At first, of course, would be mirror me’s bedroom, much the same as my own.

Purple walls.

A wispy white canopy over the bed.

The old cherry chest of drawers, which I knew quite well was just as difficult for her to get open because I’d seen her try many times.

The very first thing she saw was that the room was very much like her old room, only the things were quite different.

This, I was prepared for. Unbothered by the sameness, because I knew in my heart all I’d have to do is place an eager hand on the brass knob of the white door and step into the long-anticipated otherness that lay beyond.

She began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but all the rest was as different as possible.”

Alice wasn’t whimsical, though the story she is cast into suggests otherwise. No, Alice is responsible, dutiful even in her adherence to the rules cast upon her. She is wise beyond her years, appealing to her mother’s pragmatism; she, too, looks at the world empirically and rationally.

But she wonders all the same, as do I, what it would be to step beyond the neat lines of reason and embrace the possibilities that exist only in that which can never be known.

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

For there, I can be anything…

I can be a word.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

I can be all AND nothing.

“If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

I can be unbound by the limitations of time and space.

“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam today,’” Alice objected.

“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: today isn’t any other day, you know.”

In the wild unknown, I could even be me. Shamelessly, fearlessly, me.

Through the looking glass in that purple bedroom (ironically located on Sleepy Hollow Dr.), held the potential for magic. For oblivion and for reverence. For a total undoing of the self.

Where ego fails to take root. Where play is an acceptable code of conduct. Where rules dissolve like dreams re-awakened.

Where the unrelenting need for order and control gives way to acceptance of that which you thought impossible.

“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”

“If I’m not the same, the next question is, ‘Who in the world am I?’”

I wanted, want, unpredictability to win out. I want to not only wield it, but to become it, such that I might, too, like Alice, be crowned a queen of nonsensical nothingness.

Master of my mind and the wildflowers that grow there, to which I might be so lucky as to someday color in however I see fit.

“Things flow about so here!”

That they most uncertainly and delightfully do.

-June

I invite you to stay and be seen here.

for words with nowhere else to go

unspoken thoughts, unfinished feelings, & everything in between

---

your next read →

---

art courtesy of Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland