A/N: Please don't ask. A reflection on self and the passage of time, through the eyes of a really screwed-up...um, style-thing. I need to stop reading Tsubaki-hana and that Camellia chick on ff.n.

The Child

A voice whispers out of the mists of a metaphor and asks, Are you satisfied?

And the child says Yes.

-

The child is not really a child anymore, but still clings to that last familiar definition of self. The child holds onto every scrap of familiarity she can find, but finds the world growing on without her. In reverse order, as rooms shrink and things once so far out of reach are now accessible, but somehow it isn’t what the child wanted. Was never what the child wanted.

-

The child moves on and trips on her feet because she is always looking back. The child is always wrong but always pretends that she is right, because it is the comfortable thing to do. The child hovers indecisively between holding onto others like she really desperately hopes to want to, and shoring up the glass fortress because that’s the safe thing to do. The easy thing to do.

The child looks at others and wonders why they are all so close but so far away. A part of the child knows why, but remains silent.

-

The child reaches up for the sun and the moon and the stars not because the child desires them but because she doesn’t know what else to do. The child sits and doubts and worries and spends entirely too much time thinking, until thought eclipses all other things and doors are opened that were more comfortable shut.

The child closes them again and reaches up in that familiar motion, but doesn’t really see the sky.

-

The child sits at a window to the world and part of her knows it and part of her shies away, like a sleepy toddler wails and covers his eyes from the invading morning sun. The child uses a yardstick to keep everything at a safe distance but in the end impales herself because curiosity killed the cat.

No one ever remembers that satisfaction brought it back.

-

The child questions her existence in the detached way of one terrified of the answer. The child looks up, then down, and closes her eyes and tries to see the soul that is supposedly there. The child is blind and deaf and dumb, and her fingers are numb from reaching for something that was never there to begin with.

-

The child looks in the mirror and sees something else entirely than what is in her mind’s eye. The child tries to layer one over the other so that the two might connect and comes up with a jigsaw puzzle that is missing half its pieces. The child looks down again and squints her eyes to see beyond, and fails to notice what is right under her nose.

The child is not a child anymore, and she knows this, and ignores it.

-

A voice whispers out from the mists of a metaphor and asks, Are you satisfied?

And the child says Yes.

The child is a liar.