Here’s how it went—the sound of rain. The moonlight soft in the darkness. That taste on your tongue you get in the middle of the night when the whole world is asleep and you’re alone somewhere you’re not supposed to be. The feel of smooth, cold wood on your feet—bare, and warm from blankets. And then there’s the smell—the smell of old wood, the kind you used to smell in your grandmother’s house when you could still visit. The smell of the attic, that time you snuck up with your grandfather and he showed you the old, yellowed pictures of dead people you would forget about. 

It would always begin with a bad dream—crying out in the night, waking up tangled  and sweating in sheets you didn’t recognize and staring up at the wooden beams in the  roof. The grain staring back at you with gaping eyes. Then you would remember you  were visiting your grandparents, and you would sneak through the darkened corridors, sleepless, blood rushing in your ears. You would look at the pictures on the walls and the dark shapes of furniture at night, in this universe that you didn’t belong in, where some switch had flipped and everything turned different at night, shadowed and foreign. When you reached the age where you were starting to like this kind of thing, sneaking around and discovering the world of things you were too afraid to approach when you were younger. You would be wearing the loose,  well-worn pajamas from your childhood that your grandparents had always kept in their special drawer, whispering the names of people you’d never known, the brothers of sisters adopted or married in or occasionally the ones from someone’s childhood who’d never returned from that night in the woods. 

Then you would descend the stairs, clutching your sleeping doll tight against your  chest because you liked feeling like you could protect something. As would be typical  for this kind of night, it would be raining—not too hard, but enough for the tap-tapping of it to fill the dark rooms with its whispering, and you would wish you knew Morse code as  if the sky would be trying to tell you something. Remember when you thought  everything meant something? There, you know, under the faded red seat of the  armchair near the coffee table, is the little notebook in which you called the “Chronicle  of Magic,” since you’d learned the word “chronicle” just that week and had been using it every single day. In it you would write proof for all the clues the universe gave you that indicated you were the chosen one, that you were destined for greatness, that you  would wake up one day and be able to understand the birds singing outside your  window. 

There’s the smell of memories—dust with a hint of something sweet, so unbelievably familiar—but you’ll never know what it is, only that you’d smelled it a long time ago in another life. You would remember the things you used to bury under the bush outside the living room window. Candy rings, paper crowns, letters to the mice who you were convinced lived in tunnels in the ground with fancy road systems alongside the ants. You would remember many things here, like the first time someone had really made you feel small, when that older girl had pushed you face first into the bush and you dreamed about cutting her arms off later for weeks. All the “theories” you had about things that you were convinced would make you famous if you wrote them down but ended up barely filling three pages of a notebook you’d found in your mom’s desk. 

You would now settle on the couch by the window and watch the rain join into little rivers on the surface like you always used to when sitting in cars while the adults were grocery shopping. You would forget your reason for sleeplessness, try gathering the curtains like a blanket on your body. You would sleep in fits and starts; you would feel cold brush your feet and open your eyes to see nothing, and one time you would wake up and look out the window to see someone from a yellowed picture somewhere staring back at you. You would find the toys you lost when you were younger; you would hear the tinkling of your old bell, or your old music box, and then there would be that chipped porcelain fairy fluttering in from when you had forgotten it all those years ago at the aquarium. You would spend the whole night playing in the rain with  Alice, that blonde girl who’d been your best friend for the last seven years, and you’d never be able to remember why you stopped seeing her. 

Remember how you used to brush the fairy’s wings with your soft toddler fingers,  and you would tell Alice about how much you wanted to fly, to be able to soar and dive in the air borne by nothing but the belief that you could do it. She taught you to flap your arms when the wind blew harder because her grandma, she’d said, flew away just like that, found the right moment to flap her wings and the wind just swept her up. She told you that she would get good at it too, “because it’s in our blood,” and if ever you stopped seeing her it would be because she’d learned how to do it too and flew away to live on Pluto with her grandma. Maybe that’s why you picked up reading after you stopped visiting Alice, so that you could live in those stories again, in that magic that had once surrounded you—maybe it wasn’t Alice you’d wanted to see again, but yourself, that version of you she’d nurtured who could decipher the whispers in the rain and could almost, almost fly to Pluto on a gust of wind. 

Maybe it was the teenage years when you stopped believing in magic. Of course you  still had all those dreams, traveling through enchanted jungles and swimming in the otherworld at the bottom of the sea - and you still had all those mornings, waking up and realizing you were nobody nowhere. Maybe that was how you’d stopped talking to  Alice, unable to play the game where you would look for magic because you were tired of never finding anything. Your memory went from blurry and unfocused, scraps of smells and sounds and stories you’d see again in dreams, to clear and linear and completely bare. You seemed to see everything now, which made you see absolutely nothing anymore. When you looked in the mirror and there was a child staring back at you in an adult’s body. When you stopped flapping your arms when the wind blew because you were too heavy to fly—you could feel it. 

These were the years when disappointment would come after disappointment. When you realized that your parents would cry themselves to sleep too, when there were dead fairies behind you and pages of notes in front of you. You couldn’t place exactly when it happened, but you’d started thinking of the stories in past tense - all the stories when they lived their lives in some other world, a long time ago, like you’d missed it. That one time when you finished the book and thought, that is not me, that will never be me, and then you stared in front of you and saw exactly what was in front of you. 

And then your grandparents died and you would realize you never really knew them, look up at the roof at 5AM after your dad walked in and told you someone died for the first time in your life. And you would stare and stare and stare at that roof because your heart felt like a rock and you thought you should’ve cried but it didn’t really feel like that. Like death was something else entirely, not the easy stuff you could just cry about, but the kind of stuff you left in an attic smelling of old wood and only really thought about when you couldn’t sleep. Because it was hard to understand, to comprehend that an entire person who had lived ten times as long as you, had just ceased to exist. 

It was like one of those stories that went absolutely nowhere. You would realize nothing in your childhood memories really made sense, full of things made of half written stories and smells that you couldn’t describe. Alice didn’t exist, Alice was a dream, Alice was someone you barely knew, Alice was Grandma, and Grandma was dead. 

Then you would wake up. Look around. The rain had stopped, the grain on the wood looked back at you with gaping eyes. You found yourself tangled among the curtains on the couch, and the living room was small and empty at the same time. You hadn’t noticed in the dark - you remember you’d walked down here in the middle of the night - but all the shapes were just cardboard boxes. Remember, you were here to sell the house. Walk around, the morning cold, take a look in the mirror, take a look at the adult staring back at you. Remember, you weren’t visiting anyone, because everyone was dead and you were going to have your own family now.

That day you would tape up boxes. There, your old copy of Alice in Wonderland, and you thought, how accurate. Remember, you’re an adult now. You’ve grown up. But these are the yellowed photographs - the fitful dreams whispered by the rain. These were the ghosts you’d forget about when you woke up, the moments when you wished more than anything that you could cry instead of feeling disappointment at 5AM when Alice and your wonderland died. This was the proof that you’d lived - remember, you were an adult now, but you had your dreams too. Let Alice visit you in your dreams sometimes, smelling of old wood and the fizzle of excitement you still felt when the wind blew stronger. 

That day you would tape up boxes. There, the unnamed record player you’d left under your childhood bed for twenty years, only to resurface now with that same tune that’d still come back to you sometimes, but you’d never be able to place where it was from. It was a tune that rose and fell and danced, the kind of song that was so incredibly familiar but you just couldn’t recall the words of. It came from somewhere far away but close to your heart, somewhere between the stars, on the invisible shape of  Pluto where the dreams lived. You’d smiled, picked up a marker and written on the  player in small, careful letters: “Alice.”