First Meeting

I stared at the two keys for a long time. I didn’t take either of them. Maybe I was still hoping a third choice was hiding somewhere. A choice where I lose nothing. A choice where I don’t get it wrong. But Wonderland has its own way with people who refuse to choose. I don’t know how I got there. I only know I found myself somewhere else and finally standing in front of the person I had been afraid to meet. The bigger me. I expected her to be proud. Loud. Cruel. I thought she would list everything I still lacked and tell me I was not enough to become her. She wasn’t any of that. She was quiet. Patient. Almost ordinary. I was small in her hand, but for the first time I did not feel humiliated next to her. As if I had misunderstood this for years. Maybe what I called arrogance was never about seeing myself as too big. Maybe it was the opposite. I was so afraid of being small that I built someone larger in my mind. Someone who was always sure. Always seen. Always proving something. Now that I was finally facing her, she wasn’t proving anything. She was only looking at me. And a worse thought arrived: Maybe the bigger me was never my jailer. Maybe I made her to protect the smaller one. For the first time, I didn’t want to become larger. I only wanted to understand why being small had scared me for so long.