I suppose the only logical answer is that I was born with an arsenal of voodoo dolls at my disposal, which I freely hand to any and all who will take them. To avoid misinterpretation, allow me to be frank: they are my voodoo dolls. They are of my image, bare my features, wound my being. This must be the case, otherwise these sporadic throbbing pains would cease to make sense.

**

I'm drafted to a pendulum, in constant motion, unable to control my velocity or direction. I go where the earth takes me, victim of the current of the times and the tilt of the atmosphere, spellbound by the force that holds you steady.

**

I'm weak. All this does is show me I'm weak. And that I'm going to have to keep putting up with all these kinds of things because how else will I ever get stronger?

And I hate that I can't say more than that. Hopefully I'll be able to say more this week. I don't know. Sorry for wasting your time.

Not What I'm Looking For

I wait with the window open. I am Wendy, looking out to the second star to the right, waiting for the inevitable moment when Peter swoops in again.

The trouble with Neverland is that time is not an entity. I could have grown old there without growing old, returning to this skyline to find the window shut and locked, the Darlings long dead, tenets boarding up in our converted family home. I wouldn't be remembered, all who'd ever thought to keep the memory of me now lying in gilded boxes in the ground.

I could stop waiting, lock the window to Peter's selfish, untimely return, hang my hat on the notion that he'll never again grace me with a thimble.

I'm not the sort a boy like that wants.

Still I keep the window open, still I refuse to shut out the option that perhaps, someday, I'd rather be in Neverland. Still I prep myself for the day my daughter will take the room, to undergo the right of passage that is heartbreak at Peter's hands.

We are attracted to the impossible. It is impossible for me, as aged as I have grown, to be yet so taken with a young boy. I want vivacity in maturity, not the boyish games he played with my heart. I don't want to have to battle to gain my footing. I want someone who would grow with me, in love and age. Peter can never be what I need, waiting by the window. Peter can never mean to me now what he meant to me then.

Peter is my past; a beautiful, wonderful, unbelievable moment I shan't ever forget, but as much as Peter would be the same, I would be all the more different.

I wish to progress, to grow, to gain experience and knowledge and send my lifeless body to its gilded box a more defined person than when I entered it, and by perfection take it up again. I could not bear the purgatory of Neverland, to keep the beauty of heart, mind, and complexion of youth, but to lose the magnificence of accomplishing eternity.

Peter only offers a part. Peter brings a blissful idea of childlike happiness forever, one I always questioned why I never kept, why I set it aside with the burning urge to go sojourn in mortality and grow old and grow up rather than stay. It would have been easier. It would be elegantly better to lead such a freeing life of carefree play and discovery until the end of time. But to abandon my purpose, whatever that divine being intended for it to be, to sell my soul to the devil in slothful, superficial intent, would be a life I could never lead.

I hadn't intended to lead it to begin with. I came to be at this window by forsaking the idea of an already plotted course which my hand could neither stay nor stray.

I inhale a breath of crisp winter air falling past the gently shaking curtains in the breeze, my hand shaking as I pull the window shut, questioning for one last moment if I truly want to deny the option of returning with Peter to Neverland. I follow through; the breeze stops short.

There is no future for me in Neverland. There is no tomorrow in the past. I am no better off than a pillar of salt if I look back