I wanted to get away from my thoughts, from myself, from those voices that hissed in the dark. I could still feel their fingers on my body, criticizing and hostile. Their accusations made me sick with guilt. It boiled up inside of me, filling me with hot, hot steam, until I had no choice but to run away.

So I ran.

I crossed over the bridge. Images blurred past: children with their families, fathers carrying toddlers on their back. My head couldn’t think, I didn’t want it to, so I let my legs carry me where I could go. I was only barely conscious of the burning in my lungs and in my legs and in my heart. All I knew was that I wanted to get it out, to run out of the flesh that imprisoned me.

And then I stopped.

The crowds were milling about, but they were all facing the same way. Consciousness crept back to me slowly. Tinny music started to flow towards me, bright and Christmas-y, like someone had turn on an old radio. The music started getting louder and clearer as the radio started to boot and come to life. Festive sounds of jubilation began to rush into my ears, roaring furiously beating against my ear drums until it broke past into my consciousness.

And with that sensation I could hear, I could see. My mind cleared as if sunlight had broken through a fog and dissipated it. I could think without feeling that horrible, horrible guilt that had sat like acid in my stomach moments before, burning a hole through me.

I scrambled up on the nearest bench, wrapped around a small, raised plot of grass with a tree in the middle. I placed one small hand against the tree for balance and the other I kept by my side. I looked up, and then immediately my thoughts, which I had barely managed to recover, were blown away by a spectacle of dazzling lights. Above a sea of dark heads I saw a bright stage, far but not far enough for me to not recognize my favorite childhood friends: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy; they were all there, singing and dancing, spreading wonder and joy on Christmas Eve. Out of the corner of my eye I was vaguely aware of children smaller than I, dancing along to the great enjoyment of their parents, just as fascinated as I was with how Disney had managed to captivate the hearts and lives of so many for so long.

‘Deck the halls with boughs of holly…’ They transitioned into a new song. The Christmas lights set up on stage twinkled and danced along with the characters, adorned in bright, colorful outfits for the occasion. My eyes traveled up towards the Disney castle, standing white and magnificent against the royal blue sky, a symbol and promise of dreams coming true.

And then…

Schooong… BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Great explosions lit up the night sky, bathing the castle in red, green, gold, silver, blue. The colors scattered and drifted down like fairy dust, a million second stars to the right, fading before they touched the ground. All around I heard gasps, laughter, and applauds of delight. Somewhere in the background, a small child shrieked, terrified of the bright lights and big sounds just as I had been a few years ago. Now, I smiled, not just with my teeth and my mouth, but with my whole body, from the way I bounced up and down in glee to the way my heart fluttered and flipped.

‘Are you having a good time?’ Cheers and whoops of assent met Mickey’s question.

‘We have a very special guest for you tonight, a good friend of ours and of yours. Look, there he is!’

Thousands of faces gazed upwards towards the heavens where Mickey pointed a gloved finger. The spotlights illuminating the castle and the stage dimmed, letting the night sky fall into darkness. Everyone was quiet, waiting, wondering, until…

A collective gasp went around the park. There, among the stars, glowing like Christmas lights strung across the heavens, was a glow of red, spinning, darting, flying through the sky. The sweet jangle of sleigh bells filled the air as the fascinated crowd broke out again into applause.

‘Rudolph, the red-nose reindeer…” The lights came back on as Mickey and his friends started to dance with the crowd singing along.

I glanced at the stage, then back at the sky, the music dimming again into the crackling of a battered radio. How had they done that? I wondered. Wires? Light bulbs? Cranes?

I was only and already 11 years of age. I could no longer be content with simply being fascinated by the magical, but had started to ask questions that dismantled the fantastical into nothing more than a sum of technical machinery and deceptions.

But the questions quickly flitted away or were shoved beneath my state of awareness, along with the apprehensiveness of growing up too fast. I let myself be absorbed into the world once more, the dazzling lights, the brilliant colors, the magnificent castle, the euphoria of it all. Reality, as I had come to accept it, resumed.

But then out of the darkness a hand reached out, its grip strong and cold, absolutely unrelenting. Reality and fantasy inversed. I was no longer a wanderer strolling outside of Plato’s cave, but a silly little girl stuck in a rabbit hole. I struggled, trying to hold on, trying to stay, but the hand managed to yank me out, to tear me from this world I had grown to love. The castle and the stage and the night sky shrank away, and in its place another world, dark and menacing, swelled and towered above me. Beside it, Disney looked like a silly snowglobe, ridiculous.

They dragged me back over the bridge, and I’ve never been able to cross over since.

A/N: descriptive piece for school. this is the second draft. the first is sitting on my desk with a lot of scratch-throughs and red scribbles. please be critical and analytical... or supportive lol :