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I was walking just down the road when I thought I saw myself reflected down the road. I paused, however, with a strange feeling. There is no mirror, down the road.
She’s much smaller than me, I realize, and I continue again– albeit, cautiously.
She can’t be me, I’m much taller than that.
I approach her and her me, by coincidence only, I am going northwards and she, southwards. And as I approach, I notice at last she is eyeing me in return. Our eyes have met, by the nature of this course– I was looking at her and she was looking at me, of course that will happen.
I startle, she narrows her eyes.
She’s very small. She’s half my size. Her hair is short, her bangs are chopped from a mother’s hand with kitchen scissors. Her dress is similarly picked by someone who is not herself. Her mother also, likely. We look nothing alike, it’s only our faces.
I take initiative, being the older one. I cross the road and stand in her path. She makes no move from where she stands, only craning her neck to hold my gaze.
“What’s your name?”
She wrinkles her nose.
“[][][][].”
“How strange, so is mine.”
She says nothing, and makes to walk around me. A feeling persists, and I block her once more.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“She tells me not to talk to strangers. I don’t want to talk to a stranger– no offense, miss.”
I bit my lip; whether to prevent myself from scowling or barking a laugh, I don’t bother to wonder.
“My mother’s name is [][][][]. My last name is [][][][].”
Finally, the girl seems as taken aback as I am.
“Me too.”
“Mine too, you mean.”
She scowls. “I said that.”
This time, I don’t refrain from laughing. It’s surreal, but I feel as though a great weight has been lifted from my chest. When I’m done, I smile at her gently. She’s frowning even deeper at my laughter and seems ready to retort something at me.
“Why don’t we take a walk, you and I? I’d like to have a chat, if you don’t mind.”
She huffs greatly with her small lungs, turning her head to the side as if surveying our surroundings. Her black shoe taps the ground in quick succession like a rabbit. It’s not a perfect rhythm. It’s reckless and off-beat, more fuelled by passion than guided by precision.
“Fine. Only if you get me the ice cream with gum for eyes.”
“Of course.”
“Am I rich?” She asks me, not a minute into our walk.
“Not at all. I lied about the ice cream, by the way. I can’t afford you any.”
She spins smartly on her heel but I gently hold her shoulder.
“Don’t leave. Please?”
The girl looks at me. She must see my desperation pitiful enough, for she sighs but ultimately complies. We continue through the empty streets towards the empty park.
“So they were right to leave me. I am a loser.” She says finally.
“I’m only in college…” I say weakly.
A small hand grabs my arm, digging into it fiercely. Her lip trembles. Her voice cracks when she says,
“Am I really a loser?
Am I stupid?
Why did they leave me?
Why do they all hate me?
My friends, they all hate me…
And there’s this one girl who doesn’t, but I don’t like her. She’s too rich, she has too much. I feel like charity. I don’t think she understands me. She cries too much, it’s too much– I don’t like her.
Do I have to like her?
Mom says I’m evil–”
“No, she didn’t.”
“-- that I’m the worst child she has. She hates me too.”
“She doesn’t.”
“She hates me.”
I am quiet. We’re still walking, but she’s slower and my arm drags her slightly. I choose to wait.
“Why do they hate me?”
Our footsteps echo against the concrete. The sound fills the empty city. The empty city begins to fade as we enter the park, buildings giving way for modest trees.
At last, I open my mouth. I close it, though, and it takes another try to open it again.
“Why is that so important?”
I immediately wonder if that was the wrong thing to say, because she cries– really cries– this time. She stops walking and I have to turn to look at her, a shape crouching on the ground, tiny fists pressed against her eyes as if to push them out.
“What did I do wrong?
They won’t tell me.
I wrote a letter– I thought it was a good letter,
I said I was sorry,
And that I just wanted to be friends again,
And that I didn’t understand what I did wrong–
But I never wanted to hurt her,
And if she could just tell me what I did wrong–
I would fix it and do better,
If only they would tell me!”
She trembles. Sniffling and shaking, cowering, and wrapping her arms around herself pitifully.
“I did it twice,
It never works–
I thought–
Why doesn’t it work?
I thought you need to try!
I thought you need to talk about it, to ask about it, to ask them, and why didn’t they tell me?
I’m so lonely, [][][][]!
I’m so lonely!”
She sniffles and hiccups, and sniffles again. The girl tosses her head back and wails. Her cries carry across the park, through the trees, and over the lake. The sound travels and consumes the silent city. She cries and cries, and cries and cries, until she can’t seem to anymore, and she returns to a trembling form.
All the while, I stand without a word. I pretend to be an observer, and I adopt an observer’s eyes. For the first time, I see a child.
I don’t know what I would do, if I were to try and guide her. Perhaps teach her, to know humility and grace. To know the lines and to keep her own. But I don’t know, because even if I did, I can not change what has happened. Even tonight, our paths have only crossed to forget this meeting once we part. I know this to be true, somehow.
“Do you want the answer?” I say, finally.
Swollen red eyes peer at me.
“You are the villain. That much is true.
You discriminated, you selected, you played the queen you were never meant to be.
You are no one remarkable, no one gave you the stage.
And yet, you stood on it anyways.
You thought your own hubris as permission–”
“Hue-?”
“-- and all you did was make a fool out of yourself.
You were wrong, but you didn’t want to accept it.
Even now, you cry and whine, like the child you are,
Because you want words of comfort.
For someone to look at you with sympathetic eyes,
To bend down and stroke your hair,
And whisper to you,
‘You did what you could,
It’s all right.
You are only a child.’”
I bend down to crouch beside her, our eyes meeting.
“But the truth hurts more than that.
Your age does not excuse your actions,
Your heart knows that to be true.”
She stares at me, mouth agape. Her eyes show a pain so deep that even tears can not abate it. Her voice dissipates, and all she can make is a wounded kind of sound. I twist the knife and wonder whether to leave it or pull it out.
“That’s not fair,” she whispers hoarsely. “I didn’t know…”
“You didn’t care. Not once did you think to imagine a world outside your head. The hearts of others, their aspirations and fears, their pain. You saw it but chose not to see it.”
“I didn’t know to look!” The girl shoves me and I topple from where I crouched on shaky knees. Her face is twisted in a snarl. “I didn’t know! Okay, fine, you’re right! I could have seen it if I tried, but they never said anything! I didn’t know how– I don’t know how, how to do anything even if they did! I say the wrong things all the time! And no one tells me what the right thing is, they only tell me that I’m wrong!
I don’t know how to be right!
What do I say when someone calls me bossy, what do I say?!
What do I do when someone says I hurt them!”
“You apologize!” I shout in disgust.
“But– but that’s–!” She cries in despair. “But then what? That’s so embarrassing!”
“What, having an ounce of humility?”
The girl chokes and sobs. She is crying again. I say nothing, my lungs are heaving.
“That’s not what’s embarrassing, you stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!” She gets up and shoves me again. I gasp from the impact. She shoves me again, and again, until we’re both tumbling down the grassy slope. Her elbow hits right below my eye, our knees collide, I feel my arm smack her stomach, and her hand slaps my face. The first impacts are an accident, but as we roll together, shock mixes into mutual fury and some become intentional.
By the time we’ve reached the bottom, we’re covered in sores and bruises. My face will have a black spot for the next week, if this is real, but I’m relieved that hers is untouched. At the very least, I did not punch a child in the face. If she were really a gnat, I would not hold back, societal expectations be damned. But when my anger assuages seeing our mutual state of disarray, I finally find it in myself to pity her.
No, perhaps pity is the wrong word.
Pity implies distance, yet as I stare at her face and see my own, bloodied and scrapped, in her eyes, I feel none.
“You’re right, I know that’s not what hurts.”
We are sitting by the lake, not far from where we had been lying after the tumble. We mirror each other, hugging our knees tightly. Two pairs of dark eyes following the moon’s gibbous reflection over the water.
“It’s embarrassing to bare your heart with only the best intentions, only to find out someone’s twisted it the wrong way.
Or maybe it’s you who twisted it, and deluded yourself into thinking it was for the best.”
I hear a sniffle from my left.
“I don’t know what that means.”
I exhale slowly. It’s not from impatience. Not this time, at least. My mind is strangely calm, a dead kind of quiet. It’s not a bad feeling. I close my eyes and enjoy its quiet.
“You can probably guess, can’t you?”
“Don’t want to. I’m tired.”
“Okay, me too.”
It’s the first sound I’ve heard aside from our voices– the quiet lapping of the waves. There’s no breeze, no boats or ducks or geese; yet the waters ripple with a sort of ceaseless gentleness.
“It’s okay to be the bad guy, you know.” I say.
In the corner of my eye, I see her curl inwards slightly.
“How can it be?” She says with hurt. “They always die. The wolves, the bears, the dragons. It’s always the stupid goats and deer and people that win. I don’t care about pigs, or cows, or sheep or rabbits. I don’t see what’s so great about them. They aren’t cute at all.”
“I’m afraid you’ve been outvoted by the majority,” I shrug.
“Do you think they’re cute?”
I laugh. “No, not at all.” Leaning over conspiratorially, I speak in a near whisper with a smile, “Did you know deer don’t have innocent black eyes at all? I always thought it was like a dog’s, but they’ve got rectangular pupils. Like goats.”
The girl shrieks in a mix of horror and delight, arms falling back to catch herself. “That’s so creepy!”
I laugh boisterously, and she does too in disbelief. Shaking my head, I say, “Although some find it endearing, I can’t help but find it deeply unsettling.”
“It’s weird,” she agrees, wrinkling her nose.
“Why do you feel bad for them, the bad guys?” To be honest, I never understood the sentiment even within myself. The story was never deep, and the characters were flat and one-dimensional. The wolf never had even an implication of any personality aside from bloodlust. Or the dragon, flattening civilizations that threatened its hoard. They were alone, without a family or loved ones– they seemed to live selfishly, self-conceitedly.
And yet, why did I feel so sad?
When they were killed so brutally? Why did it not feel like justice, like retribution for all the terror and suffering they inflicted upon the innocent?
Am I just contrarian? I frown, displeased. Is this some self-centered attempt to feel unique, or superior to others?
All the while I consider this, I fail to notice the girl’s lack of response– seemingly mirroring my own quiet.
“How do we know they’re so selfish and vain?” She speaks as if having read my thoughts.
I blink. “Sometimes they outright admit it.”
“I think it’s stupid,” she says softly, yet petulantly. “What if they don’t know they’re being bad? It’s so easy for the good guys, who grew up with other good guys, to know that they’re good. And then when someone is bad, do the good guys just think they were told how to be good and decided not to?
And what if they were told, but no one encouraged them to continue?
What if they did good things and no one cared?
Or what if they did good things, and it wasn’t enough?
They didn’t know how to be enough?”
“This is something commonly explored in modern writing,” I muse. “Are you just projecting then? On the wolves and dragons?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know what that means. But I don’t know, I think they’re cuter…”
I laugh lightly. “So they just get a pass because they’re cute? What if the goats were evil?”
“I think that would make sense.”
I really laughed this time. She only stares at me, perhaps mildly offended, because she had said it so seriously. “I’m afraid that’s really shallow, my friend.” I manage to say in between breaths.
An annoyed huff. “If being deep means caring about goats, I don’t want to be deep.”
“Ouch. I think the goats would be really hurt if you hate them so much.”
“It’s not just them. I hate the rabbits and cows. I hate all of them.”
“Okay… this is starting to get a bit much.”
“I don’t want them to die or suffer,” she amends. “I’m just sick of them being so perfect and loved.”
“Mmm. I see.
In your life, who’s a rabbit?”
“Everyone.” She scoffs. “Everyone’s so perfect, except for me. I’m the only bossy one. I’m the only loud one, I’m the dumb kid that can’t focus in school. I’m the selfish one. I laugh too much. I’m only ever bad. Someone once said I was bold, but that doesn’t feel like a good thing either. It’s just all the bad things but politer-sounding.”
She wipes her eyes.
“I don’t want to be a leader. Not if it means they all leave and hate me. I’d rather be shy and polite. Just like Erin. Everyone loves her, I love her too. I want to be quiet. I wish I was a sheep, like everyone else.”
“Who called you a leader?” I say, genuinely surprised.
“Some lady at the playground. She told mom that. But maybe she said something meaner and mom tried to turn it into something nice.” She turns curiously at me. “Why did you say it’s not bad to be a bad guy?”
“I said it was okay, not that it’s not bad.”
The girl rolls her eyes with a quiet ‘ugh’. “What’s the difference?” She asks pointedly.
“I don’t know. I was just correcting you.”
A small foot kicks me smartly in the back. I shout a pained laugh from the shock.
“Stories need something to overcome; it’s how we, as a civilization and species, as humans, grow.” I start to stand up, one hand nursing my aching back while the other is outstretched for her to hold. “The three little piggies would not have learned the importance of a secure house without the threat of a wolf. They would not have learned the importance of hard work– er, at least in the edition where they survive and run to their brother’s house for help rather than get eaten up. And even if they were eaten up, which is quite frightful and is not the version I would personally want to tell a child, that teaches the reader a lesson. We need those bad things, to become better.”
She takes my hand and I lift her to her feet. We dust our clothes simultaneously.
“I don’t want the pigs to be better, I want the wolf to be better! Why does the wolf have to be a– a thing to overcome so that they get better?”
My hands pause from where they were on my shirt, and I am reminded of the reason I can’t deal with children. I’m very bad with children– something I appear to have forgotten. I naively thought it would be different because of the strangeness of this situation, but no, I’m still bad at dealing with children.
“You’re right,” I say slowly. “That… that is unfair, I suppose… it’s a bad example. But,” I say hurriedly so as to not totally lose my credibility. “Look at yourself. You experienced pain, and hurt, and shame. Those are bad things, right?”
Her lip trembles at the reminder, but she nods her head.
“And because of it, you’re reflecting on it now. You’re right, you didn’t know how to look for the feelings in others, and even when you saw it, you avoided dealing with it. You know now that it was wrong, and you’re right it sucks no one is there to tell you what you should have done, but you are able to learn from it even without them. There won’t always be a convenient wise person in your vicinity, and so actually, a lot of people do have to learn by doing it wrong many times until they find what’s right.” I pat her head. “You aren’t alone in that, actually. In your small town, you feel like that, but there are many, many people in this world.
You don’t know yet, how big this world is.
And even I don’t, not fully.
It’s always so much bigger than you can imagine.
And in this big world, there are many little girls just like you– or even adults– that are fighting to be wrong and wrong again, but they find what’s right in the end when they keep going.”
Our hands together, I walk us back to the path and point to a nearby streetlamp.
“Imagine the world is dark, and all you have is a single lamp. You don’t know where any other light is, everywhere away from this one lamp is dark. But can you imagine, staying by this same streetlamp always? Forever and ever? This same old streetlamp? Nothing to do, no games to play, no friends to talk with. Wouldn’t it get so boring? Wouldn’t it get so unimaginably boring?”
“I’d probably die of boredom,” she agrees solemnly. I suck in a breath, trying not to find the stoic face of a child terribly funny.
“The only thing you can do is walk away and into the dark. You’ll stick your arms out,” I do as so, to demonstrate. “And wander for whoever knows how long. And it’s scary. You might run into walls and stumble and trip, you’ll get hurt, but then one day, you’ll see something– another light. And underneath it, is another little girl just like you. Or maybe it's a boy. Or maybe it’s a grown-up, or maybe it’s a puppy.”
Her face lights up at the prospect.
“And then, it would be worth it, wouldn’t it? All that wandering?”
I look at her, but her face is skeptical and hesitant. I sigh, running a hand through my thick, still tousled hair from the tumble.
“Sorry, to be honest, I don’t know. I’m still wandering around myself. But, I met a few people and a few new lights. And I met a puppy–” she gasps, looking at me with wide, wide, wide excited eyes. “And so, I think it’s been worth it. I still get hurt, but the other lights I found, I think they’re beautiful. So much more beautiful than you can imagine right now, and my puppy, dog, is more worth it than anything else in the world.” Even if she’s far from perfect, I think to myself, reminded of all those runaway escapes and hours spent in agonizing worry. But at the same time, my heart swells with such adoration at even the mention of her. And I know it to be more true than any other truth, that she is and was worth it.
I wonder what expression I make, for the girl studies me carefully, and something in her shoulders seems to relax.
“Some people are lucky,” I continue. “Some people are born with many lights, and already other people by their side. Some are born in mansions of lights. Some have pathways laid out for them, guided by long trails of lights.” I look at her, smiling bittersweetly.
“But we all explore the dark at some point in our lives, and feel the same fear of not knowing what will come in it. That’s what makes us human. It’s a truth we all know, but sometimes it takes us different times to accept it.”
Finally, we arrived back at the street we met. I take her to her sidewalk before I return to me. She’s quiet still, eyes on the ground, but her expression is contemplative.
I hesitate, then place my hands on her shoulders and crouch down to meet her gaze.
“You won’t remember this, but I think…” I trail off, reconsidering. Who am I to offer wisdom? I don’t know anything at all. In the end, we’re the same.
But her eyes are fixed on mine, expectantly. There’s a fragile kind of hope in them, and I realize I have to finish what I started.
“You have a good heart.” I press a finger gently on her chest, her head turns downwards to look at it. “That’s a very nice thing to have, and one day that heart might– will,” I correct myself carefully. “It will show, and people will appreciate it. You need to protect it, because a big heart is equally fragile. And when it gets hurt, I think people do mean things. And you need to be careful when that happens. And be careful to see that same struggle in other people.
You can be a bad guy, and you can try to be a good one. And you can be a good one, and still do bad things.
That’s okay.
Even your sheep, your rabbits, and all the goats you meet, the same applies to them. They’re still learning, just not when you’re not looking. But if you see it, and if you can recognize it, and still be kind, you’ll make more friends than you could ever imagine.
And you’ll get a puppy one day, just remember that. And you’ll love her more than anything you’ve ever loved.”
At my final words, she looks up with me and it’s filled with such unadulterated joy as she embraces me fiercely. I freeze, only because I’ve never been hugged so earnestly by a child– they don’t typically take kindly to me–, but I find it in myself to return the gesture.
"Maybe," her voice comes out muffled, from where her face is buried deep in my shirt. "Maybe I'm not such a total loser after all."
I return to my sidewalk, and she waves to me from the other side of the street. I wave back, and we smile at each other.
We return to our paths, and walk forwards.