The Little Fairy in the Woods
Midsummer Eve (1908), Edward Robert Hughes.
I, naturally, was a fairy.
As little as one, and just as evil.
I wanted to hide most of the time, tucked behind little concoctions of my own, filled with pillows, plushies, notebooks, and books I'd never read but loved having around simply because I liked the way they looked.
And in those little worlds I created, I was exactly that, a fairy living inside a flower. Or a spy in the Amazon. Santa's little elf. A warrior princess. A tiny person standing at the edge of a great, dark forest, about to discover that magic was real, both within me and all around me.
In reality, I was a little girl hiding. Looking for gnomes inside the hollow trunks of old trees, hoping to find tiny doors leading to their tiny homes. I wanted to believe in magic so badly.
I've often wondered why. I wasn't an only child, but I remember that part of my life as a lonely one. I was quiet at family gatherings, sleepy long before midnight, and shy as a mouse. In my make-believe worlds, I was someone important, someone destined to change the world I lived in.
Nowadays, I think about that little girl with so much nostalgia that I wonder if I'd cry if I ever had the chance to meet her. I'd cry for the way she chose to cope with everything happening around her. Adults who didn't know what to do with little children. Adults who wanted to be good parents but had no guidance of their own. Adults who were still children themselves. And so, children became parents, caretakers, and guiding lights for adults who were just as broken.
And when children become adults and, naturally, their minds begin looking for someone to blame, they can't cope with the idea that maybe there's no one to blame. Or that there are so many people to blame they wouldn't know where to begin. It's hard to want to hold someone responsible and then find yourself rationalizing their faults. Excusing them.
It might sound like I'm getting off track, but I've always hated this recent trend of turning every villain into someone misunderstood. Maleficent wasn't really evil. There's more. The Wicked Witch was discriminated against and turned into a political scapegoat.
Sometimes I want to be a kid again and see evil for what it is. Evil. Sometimes I don't want to accept that people's actions are shaped by the actions of those who came before them, that while we choose what to do with what we've been given and how we've been raised, our circumstances still matter.
Sometimes I don't want to understand my parents or the people who raised me. Sometimes I want to be that little evil fairy I was as a child and gather every ounce of resentment into myself, to become dark and bitter.
Then I'll cry it out.
And finally, I suppose, I'll understand that what's done is done.