Work Text:
Alice got lost, and I guess that we really can't blame her;
They say she got tangled and tied in the lies that became her.
They say she went mad, and she never complained,
For there's peace of a kind in a life unconstrained.
She gives Cheshire kisses, she's easy with white rabbit smiles,
And she'll never be free, but she's won herself safe for a while.
“Off with her head!”
“We’re all mad here.”
Alice fell down a rabbit hole, wandered from the beginning and made her way to the end and stopped. She came back to England and like a good girl told her elders what had happened.
They called her mad.
She kept telling her stories and they kept calling her mad. A man pretended to listen to her, pretended to believe. He wrote a book, called it a fairy story of the mad ravings of a sad girl. Still Alice kept telling her stories, they weren’t stories after all. They were lessons.
Sometimes forever is just one second long.
Her family indulged her for a time. Her mother smiled over her head and her father patted her hair. Her nurse shuffled her from the room and cast concerned glances over her shoulder.
We’re all mad here.
Alice wandered through a mad world and woke up in another one that was just as mad although they all pretended it wasn’t. They looked at her as mad and patted themselves on the back and praised themselves. Alice told her stories and watched the adults around her.
She heard her parents discuss a marriage for her sister. They whispered that she could make a good match. A beneficial match. A wealthy match. And then their eyes turned to Alice playing with her doll by the fire.
“At least one daughter will supplement the other.”
“She could still grow out of this madness.”
“Let us hope.”
Her mother stopped smiling and her father stopped petting her head. Her nurse started openly staring at her and not over her shoulder.
“Stop telling lies Alice.”
“Stop this raving Alice.”
Little mad Alice. That’s what she heard whispered. She saw how her mother worried and her father paced and her nurse dithered. She saw the pitying looks sent her way. She saw the head shakes and felt the weight of their eyes.
She also saw her the bruises that dotted her sister’s arms. She saw how her sister flinched from her wealthy husband's hand.
“We’ll never marry Alice off. Everyone know’s she’s mad. She’s been telling these stories for too long now. Cats that disappear, Mad Hatters that give riddles? Caterpillars that smoke a pipe! It was alright when it was the imagining of a child but she’s near fourteen now.”
“We can’t send her away. We’ll keep her here, with a private nurse. Maybe one day it’ll go away.”
Alice sat in a sunny window and kept to her needle point. She wasn’t free. She was confined to the house and the company of a nurse and the tonics they gave her that made her mine fuzzy. She told her stories, she told her truth and blew kisses to the stable boys. Bruises never marked her skin.
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
It had been seven years, half her lifetime and she still didn’t have the slightest idea as to the answer.
Maybe the Hatter was right. Maybe there is no answer. Maybe the world is just paths that lead nowhere and everywhere, disappearing cats, mad queens and unsolvable riddles.
Maybe that was the secret. Alice knew her stories were true, she knew she wasn’t mad. Did it matter though? In this world- did it matter?
Perhaps that was the great secret. In this false smiling world where bruises were a sign of a good marriage and truth was considered madness, perhaps madness was the only truth one could find. Maybe this world with it’s solid roads, it’s pointed signs and it’s unchanging buildings was the mad world and Wonderland was the the true reality. At least it was honest about it’s madness.
Imagination is the only weapon against reality.
After all, we’re all mad here.