Alice

Alice drifts back into my mind. Not the Alice I read as a child, soft and curious, but the one who knows that stepping through the glass is stepping into everything reversed, everything broken, everything real. Words bend. Time coils. Rules shift before you even notice. You run, and still you stay. You speak, and nothing lands. And she moves. Step by step. Square by square.

And the world today is like that. Speech contorts. Lies dress themselves as truth. Truth folds in on itself. I watch people speak in contradictions, in promises that are nothing. I feel it in my own days, my own life, where consequences spiral, rules twist, and I am pulled along in shapes I did not draw. Absurd. But still, impossible or not, I move. I must move.

I am small. Insignificant. Limited by forces I cannot name. And yet, I move. I watch myself move. I pause. I measure. I step. I breathe. I note the rhythm, the strange logic beneath the chaos, the glimmers of order in the spinning. Like Alice, I fold into the world and fold it back into myself. Memory folds. Past and future coil together. Mistakes return dressed as new. Words fail. Hope loops with despair, chasing itself around corners I cannot see. And still, somehow, moving, breathing, noticing—this is proof that I exist. That I am. That I am not swallowed by the chaos.

The absurdity is everywhere. It is the test. The lens. The pulse that sharpens attention. It demands presence. It demands noticing. It demands that I inhabit myself in the middle of a world that refuses to stay still. And so I walk, step by step, square by square, into the impossible, into the mirrored, into the impossible made real, until the ground becomes something I can trust, if only for this moment, if only for now, if only enough to keep moving.