I could be Alice in my version of Wonderland

I actually wrote this last year as an assignment. Reading trhough it, I think it works pretty well with Why I Write:

Cecil was a caterpillar. Cecil was my friend. The last time I saw Cecil, he was this big. I said “Cecil, what have you done?”

What Cecil the caterpillar had done was create a book worm –a print consuming monstrosity that would be swayed by neither television nor the occasional recreational activity. I had never really been one for the outdoors. Growing up in a city where the park was about as safe as a loaded gun in a slum village, I had to learn how to keep myself safe from my thoughts and the reality of the stagnancy that was fast becoming my childhood.

I had been Alice long before Wonderland became a metaphor for half-lived dreams and half-conscious concepts. My rabbit was clad in four-inch heels and a working suit. We navigated our way through the concrete jungle and found the rabbit hole at the end of an alley on West Street. Howl’s Moving Castle had settled in Durban’s CBD and I had stumbled into Narnia. The smell of unopened pages in aged books did to me what I had seen fairy dust do to Peter Pan.

From the day of what I continue to believe was my greatest discovery, I did believe in fairies. What was in that book store-cum-paradise was a fantasy so otherworldly that not even J.K Rowling and all the wizards of Hogwarts could conjure up. I drove my first car in the rooms of that establishment. With my hands on Christine’s devilish dashboard I raced into a Paradise Lost and found myself in the world of prose and poetry. I have never looked back.

Since that first glance into the looking glass I have gathered my rosebuds while I may and welcomed literature with an Embrace that Mark Behr has returned effortlessly for the past seven years. A lot has happened in that time. I have fallen in love, for one. In the Eleven Minutes that it took me to find Paulo Coelho, I had re-invented myself into an entity that had her life written on unread pages as much as she had her heart captured in The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Cecil was a caterpillar. Cecil was my friend. The first time I saw Cecil, he was this big. I said “Cecil, why are you this big?” He said, “I was just born”. I was born with Cecil that day, and will die when Veronika finally decides to die successfully.