if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills

This room is different, somehow.  It is exactly as he remembers it and yet in some way, it is not the same at all.  He steps inside of it, taller and slower and more sedate than he had been the last time he walked these floors, and nothing feels familiar.  No sweet sense of peace steals through his heart.  He feels no closure.

This isn’t where I belong.  Not anymore.

It’s such an awful realisation.  It punches him in the chest, swift and startling, and he longs to at least pretend that curling up on the lovingly maintained bed and crying like he did when he was young would bring him a genuine sense of comfort.

But he is older now.  It doesn’t feel like he should be, but he is.  He feels somewhere between ten and ten thousand, too old to know how to take joy from life, yet too young to know what joy life was supposed to bring.  He feels confused, lost, frightened.  

Who am I?  Who am I supposed to be now?

They said, go forward.  Where is forward?  If forward is out there, does that mean I have to leave this place behind?

He stands there, trying to ford the growing distance between the things he sees before him and the tumultuous shore of his mind, the tangle of confusing memories that he still doesn’t know how to sort through.  Familiarity is supposed to be comforting.  It’s been his only solace for so long now.  Here, he knows what to expect; he always has.  That should bring him comfort.  That should make him feel safe.

He should want to stay here.

Does he?

Gentle footsteps- her footsteps, he knows.  He’s gotten used to listening for steps, at guessing to whom they belong.  And hers are embedded deep within his mind.  She comes and stands beside him, offering a wistful smile to the bedroom she’s kept neat and clean and perfect for him, and he realizes with a pang that he’s taller than her now.  Not by much, but enough for the knowledge to prod agonizingly at the sore spot on his heart.

He can tell from how she acts that she wants him to stay.  She wants him to stay here, to stop getting older, to pick up where they left off and finish being her little boy, the way he was before everything changed.  And though he knows it’s absurd, he wishes he could give her that- he wishes he could change right then and there, shift and shrink into his twelve-year-old self, and watch the years fall away from her face as she draws him near and shelters him in her arms.  His head would only come to her shoulder, the way it did then.  He’d be assured by his own smallness, comfortable in his role as the little one, the vulnerable one.  

The one who wasn’t going anywhere for a long time.  The one who didn’t have to worry.  The one who didn’t have to take fate into his hands and learn how to outsmart it, to push forward and try to make sense of a world that had only ever wished to seize him by the neck and strangle him slowly with its unending cruelty.

But as he stands by her, watching her watch the ghost of years long past, it hits him.  To seize fate, to learn to face the world- that’s exactly what he needs to do.  Maybe there is a faint reflection of that little boy somewhere, running through the halls of their rose-tinted memory, filling the warm house with his singing and laughter.  But he is no longer small, and he is still and scared and cold, and feels nothing like laughing or singing.  He isn’t sure what he does feel like doing, but he knows now- it isn’t to be done here.

I’m changing, he thinks, and lets terror steal through him at the fact.  Whether I like it or not.  I have changed, and I will keep changing, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I am grown now.

It isn’t fair, but I am grown now.

And as he turns to her, watching his own sorrowful movements in the deep brown mirrors of her eyes, he can tell by her rising tears that she knows.