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You are a child again.
You have not been a child for a very long time, and it frightens you.
Are you meant to feel this weak? This small? This helpless?
Are you meant to feel this alone?
You do not know. All you know is that your world has been flipped upside down in a multitude of ways, and now you have no idea which way is up.
You are not sure you will ever have an idea.
Memories swirl around you as you float in the murky depths of fear and sorrow, and your reaching hands cannot claw their way to the surface. You are drowning, sinking in the blackness, and the light slips farther and farther from your grasp with each day that ticks by. There is such desperation in your chest, but you cannot find the air to breathe.
Sometimes you try to remember the first time you were a child, because you are sure it felt different than this. You were happy and carefree, playing with your friends in the forest, blissfully unaware of your fate. Your body felt right and the sun was warm and your heart was filled with happiness.
But now you wake up to limbs that feel too thin, to a body that is too short, even though it is no different than when you were first a child. Now your heart feels too big for your chest and your voice is too high and no one will listen to you because you are too small to be worthy of noticing.
Sometimes you wonder how it is possible to carry so much grief and still keep on living. Sometimes you wonder how your skin has not splintered into pieces from the weight of nightmares that haunt your every step.
Sometimes you wonder if you are even real, or if you are a fragment of someone else, someone who doesn’t exist anymore. Someone who was left behind in another time, and now you’re all that remains of his ghost.
You try telling yourself that your life now is not so very different from adulthood, really. The sorrow is the same. The fear is the same. The loneliness is the same.
You are just smaller now, and nobody listens to you anymore.
You wish you could tell them how big you used to be, how strong. How tireless. But now you are thin and frail and unimportant. Now you are too young to ever be taken seriously.
Sometimes you sit with your back against a tree and watch the sun filtering through the leaves and pretend that your life never changed, that you’re still innocent, that you never left the forest.
But then you look down and see the scars on your skin and feel the weight of exhaustion seizing your bones, and you remember that everything changed and it will never be the same again. No matter how much you might wish otherwise, your fate was woven against your will, and there is no going back.
Sometimes you look up at the moon and think it is still falling.
At night you wander through the fields, or through the streets of whatever town you might come across, unable to rest out of fear that you’ll be dragged into a nightmare. Always her image burns at the back of your mind– the tears on her face as she bid you farewell, the notes of her lullaby that took you from her side forever. You could speak with her at any time if you wished, to the girl at the castle who bears her name and voice and image, but she is not the same.
She is the princess, but she is not yours.
Still, though, you talk to the girl you left behind in another life. You speak softly to the moon as though it can transmit your words across the stars, across time to where she waits for you. You etch messages into dirt with a stick and hope the soil will carry them to her. You whisper secrets to the rain as though your longing will be delivered straight to her heart. But you can never speak to her face-to-face, because the girl you knew is gone and you will never see her again.
Even if you could speak to her once more, you wonder if she would recognize you, or if she would brush you off like everyone else. A silly little boy in a green tunic, whose boots are too big for his feet, whose eyes are too large for his face. She would never brush you away, you tell yourself, but inside your fear persists.
Even on the few occasions you’ve spoken to her in this life, to the princess who doesn’t know you like yours did, you are overcome with dread that she’ll laugh in your face. She never treats you with anything but the utmost respect, and there is always something more in her face, like she’s trying to remember something at the very edges of her memory, but still that fear pinches at your heart, squeezes your throat. So you avoid her, because then she can never turn you away.
The days pass like withered leaves in the forest, and still you feel no different. You feel ten years old, and seventeen, and a hundred and seven, all at once, and your body cannot tell which one of them is real. You spend your days roaming the wilderness, or sitting in dark alleyways trying to forget, but always the memories shadow your every waking moment. Thousands upon thousands of voices crowd your mind with each second that passes, imploring you for help in an unceasing cacophony until you begin to think you’re losing the last bit of sanity you still possess.
Sometimes you gaze up at the stars and try, feebly, to make a wish. Your voice is too high and your hands are too small, but you imagine that you are able to touch the night sky itself, and that all your desires have spilled into your palms like fireflies. You wish with all your heart to be rejoined with the ghost you were taken from, because then maybe you could be happy, but every time you open your eyes you are still small and weak and unimportant, and nothing has changed.
Nothing will ever change. Not anymore.
Once you were a child in the body of an adult, and now you are the opposite, and you don’t know what to do with yourself anymore. You belong nowhere. You are wanted by no one. You have no place in the world aside from the one you have clawed your way into. It is all you can do to balance the storm of grief and loss and fear and sorrow that tears your heart into fresh shards with each new day that comes.
What can you do, lost as you are? How can you fix it? You begin to think you cannot, that you are stuck in this cycle forever. That you are stuck eternally in this body, in these limbs, in this fragile helplessness where no one pays you any mind.
You are small, and you are weak, and you are sick with fright you can’t explain, because the other children you see do not carry the burdens you do. They run and laugh and play, and there are no shadows beneath their eyes. There is no wrongness in their voices. They do not bear the weight of innocence lost before its time and a boy both old and young, the years swirling in his mind until he can no longer decipher which age he really is.
Your breath is so painful in your lungs, and the air beside you is empty where a glowing orb should be.
Your heart is empty, too. You wonder if it will ever feel full again, or if you will carry out the rest of your days with the sense that something has been torn from your chest, something you will never get back no matter how desperately you try.
You are a child again. You have not been a child for a very long time, and it frightens you.
But maybe you never really grew up.