There are daysI wake already falling.

Not from a rabbit hole but from yesterday’s certainty, watching it unravel before my feet remember where the ground was meant to be.

The maps insist there should be roads here.

Instead,

there are conversations with what feels abstract, questions that answer themselves, doors that ask for smaller versions of me, and clocks that refuse to recognise the same hour twice.

Someone says “This way.”

Someone else laughs.

Guidance dissolves until only it’s questions remain.

Every guide appears convinced they know the shape of my becoming, yet each points towards a different horizon, and I wonder…

are they leading me, or are they only echoes of every possibility my own mind hasn’t yet met?

Perhaps truth isn’t always one thing.

Perhaps sometimes it is simply an opening?

Another crossroads wearing a friendly face.

I have grown too large to fit inside the stories I once called home.

I have become so small that doubt has dissolved me into silence.

There are days I cannot remember whether I am changing to survive the world,

or whether the world keeps rearranging itself around whoever I dare become.

Who was I before circumstance began writing footnotes beneath my name?

Who am I now, when every choice is coloured by things I never chose?

How much of this voice belongs to me

and how much is borrowed from

echoes,

expectations,

inheritance,

fear,

hope,

or someone else’s dream?

The leader demands certainty.

The Hatter celebrates nonsense.

The Caterpillar asks,

“Who are you?”

As though identity were never an answer, only the courage

to remain with the question.

They say to keep moving.

Yet sometimes it feels like the someone else’s ‘s race…

legs burning, heart faithful,

breath spent,

while the landscape stands perfectly still.

How strange to discover that exhaustion can resemble progress,

and stillness can carry us farther

than running ever could.

I have searched for directions

as though forward were a place.

But what if forward

is simply the next honest step

taken by someone who no longer demands that the path explain itself?

Perhaps Wonderland was never madness.

Perhaps it was the unbearable honesty

of a world that refused to pretend certainty existed.

because everything living must.

Where every contradiction is allowed to breathe.

Where truth does not arrive wearing a crown, but disguises itself as curiosity.

So I walk.

Not because I know where I am going

Not because the signs have become clearer.

Not because the questions have surrendered.

I walk because somewhere

between the impossible directions, the

disappearing guides,

the doors that shrink,

the skies that bend,

the names I’ve forgotten

and the selves I’ve outgrown,

I have begun to trust the one thing

Wonderland never took from me…

the quiet voice that keeps choosing to wonder instead of pretending it already knows.

Perhaps reality

is not a single country

shared equally by us all.

Perhaps each of us wanders through our own impossible landscape,

meeting one another

where the paths briefly cross, calling those meetings truth.

And perhaps to love another is not to see the same world,

but to stand beside them long enough to believe their Wonderland is just as real.

So if tomorrow

I awaken falling again,

I will not ask how to escape.

I will ask…

what is it this new landscape is trying to teach the version of me

I have not yet become.

Stacie Amelia 2026