When the boy said he'd return to the house around the corner to retrieve his rogue shadow, he didn't think he'd leave the place with company.
But there he was. In the skies heading to Never Land with the girl who tells stories.
He knew the night would be full of surprises the moment he passed through the window of the girl's house. But the most surprising thing yet? He had embraced it all.
In the strangeness of meeting the girl, he had found that a part of him had slowly broken free. And when he had spoken of Never Land and saw the girl's eyes lighting up, he knew that he'd bottled up pixie dust not for one, but two. And now that he flew with the girl by his side, it was all strange still.
Because the air had never felt this light to breathe in before, the space in these skies never this wide. His limbs had never felt this free in flight, and there had never been so much wonder in it all. Perhaps the boy had forgotten the feeling. Until now. For teaching the girl to fly was like learning it anew.
"Second star to the right and straight on til morning," the boy said aloud, and it was like this was his first time too. And perhaps, as he took it all in, in a way, it was.
a brief reimagining of Disney’s Peter Pan #5
The night I turned 21,
I sat at the head of a table in a room fashioned to be that from Harry Potter.
Gryffindor reds and ferrero rocher snitches, mini cauldrons M&M-filled and a wall dressed in handwritten Hogwarts letters. A Happee Birthdae Wendy cake, and a Sorting Hat ceremony later, the five of us were sat around the table for dinner. N demanded a speech, a thing she'd been pushing on us days before. So they spoke, and so did I.
I recalled the story of a girl, a group of strangers and a mother.
In the story, the girl had lost.
She was sitting on the couch, surrounded by a small group of people she had only briefly gotten to know, in a house full of strangers for a sombre occasion. She wore a hesitant smile on her face - but it was her first genuine one that day. And when she turned her head, she found that someone was looking at her from across the room - a steady gaze upon her kind and gentle face, the corner of her lips turned up just a little to reveal the hint of a smile - one that was solemn, tender, sad.
The girl had wondered what the look meant.
Back to the moment where I was a girl who had lost, with a gaze of a mother upon my face from across the room, and a group of strangers around me the same ones who, at the night I turned 21, were looking at me as I told my story.
And what the look meant, I hadn't figured it out before. But the next time around when I'd see that look, it would be reflected on mines as I sat on the head of the table in a room fashioned to be that from Harry Potter.
She will be okay. Maybe those were the words the mother had said to herself that day she looked across the room to the girl who had lost.
I will be okay, I said, as I looked to the faces sitting around me at the table.
And when I figured out what the look meant, knew that it was one I'd wear time and time again in this company, I realised that this was, indeed, the very best kind to have.
