Amelia Through the Looking Glass
I will now say something that may seem a bit mad: life before COVID-19 was only a month ago. My current world seems unrecognizable from the one before. I almost never leave home. When my neighbor and I see each other catching fresh air, we yell our greetings from the opposite sides of the road. My coworkers are little faces in a computer screen. Yet that's not the craziest thing. The craziest thing is that it's starting to feel normal, as if I’ve been doing this forever. It’s only when I think about it that I realize that this new ‘normal’ isn’t normal at all.
I turned 26 last Tuesday. Even though the world is shut down, my family - my mom, dad, brother, and fiance - decided to make a day of it, with a lavish, Alice in Wonderland themed birthday tea. I made the Victoria sponge cake and Austin made the scones. We ate cucumber sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches. In the absence of sausage rolls, we had pigs in a blanket (the American kind with blankets of dough, that is - none of this English bacon nonsense)! Multiple colorful tablecloths and Mom’s best china bedecked the table. I glued a childhood teaset into ridiculously teetering towers of dishes, and set them with goofily large roses. As we sipped our Yorkshire tea, Austin read us a selection from the chapter “Mad Tea Party” in Alice in Wonderland to set the tone.
And though the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story,
For “happy summers days” gone by,
And vanished with the glory —
It shall not touch with breath of bale
The pleasence of our fairytale.
Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’
I’ve long found a kindred spirit in Alice and her sense of wonder. I have never identified with her more than now, as life has become a strange inversion of what it once was. Like myself, Alice finds herself in these strange, new worlds. These worlds operate by their own set of rules, and while whimsical, they are not entirely safe. The existence of the jabberwocky, though never seen, haunts Alice’s travel across the chessboard world behind the looking glass. Right now I feel like we are also behind the looking glass, in a world that looks much like the one we knew, yet is completely different. We forget ourselves, forget who we were before we shuttered ourselves in our homes, and the threat of our own jabberwocky looms over our every step outside.
I was rereading Alice Through the Looking Glass before my birthday and stumbled across the passage where Alice meets the White Queen. She had traveled across the chessboard world behind the looking glass, and suddenly is overwhelmed with loneliness. The White Queen, a bit of a hot mess herself, gives Alice a pep talk, which is as relevant to us now as it was for Alice:
“Oh don’t go on like that!” cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. “Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!”
I’ve decided to take the White Queen’s advice and consider what a long way I’ve come, rather than dwell on the loneliness of this present world. A year ago, I celebrated my 25th birthday in Ottawa with my brother, my childhood best friend Clare, and with Austin. We spent an afternoon at the National Gallery, and then had tea at the Moscow Tea Room in the Byward Market. When I think back to that time, I can’t help but consider how much has changed since then, even aside from ‘Rona-related nonsense. Moreover, it isn’t just what has changed that strikes me - it’s that everything is so much better than I could have imagined.
I was falling completely in love with this brilliant grad student on that Spring day in Ottawa, and more than I even realized. I fell in love with his gentle heart and thirst to understand everything about the world, from theology to rap music. My world was just beginning to come into color and focus, and I still had no idea how vibrant it would become. It’s like the old show tune goes - “there were bells… and I never heard them ringing… ‘til there was you.” Love wasn’t something I was seeking before I met Austin, and I considered marriage something far off in the future, if at all. Happily, that changed quickly. Today, my life, which was already blessed with many fulfilling relationships, is filled all the more with new friends and family, with colleagues and mentors, all gained in the last year. I’ve traveled to new states and old cities, enjoyed music festivals and mountain hikes. I’ve said “yes” to marrying the love of my life. As I think about all the wonder this year has brought, I know that the year ahead, even though changed, will be even more full of delight.
I am starting to realize that perhaps I am not Alice afterall. Alice always finds her way back home, back through rabbit hole and looking glass, back to the way life was. Yet in our lives, things never return to the way they were. We speak of looking forward to things “returning to normal” after the pandemic. But life will never be normal, because we will all be changed, in some way, some big and others small. Life never returns to the way it was. Maybe that’s because all of life is, in a sense, Wonderland. We are not Alice, wandering through as a sojourner. Instead, we are the strange characters who populate those bizarre worlds. The deeper we go into life, the curiouser and curiouser it becomes. There are some things that are certain for the year ahead, but chief among these is unpredictability. And while I can’t say precisely what the next year will bring, I can’t wait to find out.
