Keyhole Girl (Alice, Annotated #3)

There is always a smaller door
somewhere at the end of the hall,
a golden key shining on the glass table,
promising another life
if I can make myself fit.

I learned early that bodies
were things people discussed aloud,
measured against cousins, classmates, mirrors,
as if girlhood were its own Wonderland
and somebody had to be too large for it.

The instructions were always simple.
EAT ME. DRINK ME.
Become this, lose that,
every command dressed as possibility,
every consequence left off the label.

So I learned the arithmetic of shrinking.
Less could become beautiful.
Less could become disciplined.
Less could make someone want me longer.
Less could almost pass for control.

For years, I mistook disappearance
for transformation.
I made before-and-after pictures
into little looking glasses,
proof that vanishing could be called progress.

Sometimes the shrinking came from stress.
Sometimes from love.
Sometimes from medicine I knew
would quiet more than one kind of hunger.
The reason changed.
The door did not.

Someone only had to say tiny
about another woman
and suddenly I was six again,
too large for the passage,
already apologizing for taking up the room.

Wonderland has always been generous
with ways to alter a girl.
Cake for growing.
Bottles for shrinking.
A pool of her own tears
waiting whenever neither one is right.

Every room insists on a different body.
Grow here. Shrink there.
Take up space, but never enough to inconvenience anyone.
Be wanted, but never heavy with wanting.
Keep the golden key somewhere in sight.

I have spent years negotiating
with that little door,
convinced there must be something beautiful
on the other side
if only I arrive small enough.

But Wonderland moves the threshold.
The glass table stays just out of reach.
The bottle keeps asking for another sip.
And every time I become less,
the doorway becomes smaller too.