Sometimes I see some one I knew so many years ago, or see a screen name on my buddy list that I'd almost forgotten, and wonder what they're doing now. They're always there in the very back of my mind, occasionally bubbling to the surface. Not with curiosities about how they are now, but with reminiscence of the things that happened back then. I see one of them and, counting the years on my fingers, realize that the pre-teen friend I laughed with back then is now in college, doing the things "grown-ups" were doing back then. I wonder to myself why it makes me feel so old. I'm not old. My bones don't feel old, nor my limbs, or eyes. But the mind that looks out from those eyes feels as though it was as long ago as a fairy tale's beginning. Now I wonder why those friends seem to have things together. They are following what they wanted to do back then, looking towards the future, while I'm stuck, lost, in the present, turning my mind ever back to the once upon what seems like a long time ago wishing I never had to leave my fairy tale. Why must I be Gretal, and they Alice, and while I stand here, looking at the open oven and not willing to push in the witch, they have found their way back through the looking glass, into the real world. Where is my strength, my looking glass, so that I could possibly get back into the real world myself? Perhapes I'm doomed to step into the oven that is the oblivious heat of mediocrity. There would be no shove from the witch, because although my mind puts chains around my heart and ambitions, it doesn't have the power to push me down, only hold me in place. It seems it will restrain me long enough that eventually the weariness of standing between the choices of to be or not to be, I will choose not to be. Choose to simply finish my walk through life almost mindlessly, completing the menial tasks set forth in a menial job. Choose to be a peon to the Alices that managed to crawl, or even run, through the looking glass. My fairytale won't end with "happily ever after", if any ones does, but will likely end with "monotonously ever after." Maybe, if I'm lucky, it will end as nothing worse then She Lived Ever After.