Pixie Dust Never Molested Anyone

It’s Greek food, sure. But it’s also a grilled octopus leg like a curled question mark on a porcelain plate, served by a waiter who looks like he reads Pynchon. It’s blue tulips blooming where tulips shouldn’t. It’s ducks and lambs in godless, emerald pastures, dumb and soft and unbitten by the world. It’s my dog’s cataracted eyes, pale as peeled grapes, the moment before he looked away forever. It’s paprika fries, red like a slapped cheek, eaten on the curb outside a dentist’s office. It’s Pixie Hollow reimagined as a liminal rave. Phantogram booming from the constellations.

It’s the corpse of Terranora Lakes Country Club, once the Xanadu of Tweed Heads: manicured greens manic enough to madden men. It’s where grooms gambled the honeymoon fund, where brides ghosted mid-vow, where men in navy suits shook hands like knives. Go right. Go wrong. Don’t go at all. It’s a mirage with a mailing address. A sun-drenched hallucination with golf carts. It’s gone. Bulldozed. Eaten by the past. Like the theatre on Folsom. Like my dog. Like any place that ever made you believe in forever.

Pixie Hollow isn’t real. Neither is Tinkerbell, unless you count the dying light of a star you wished on when you were six. But why can’t we build it anyway? Is physics the villain? Or is it just adulthood, slow and meatless and grey? Greek food exists. Paprika fries too. Blue tulips, botanically implausible, commercially engineered, emotionally devastating. Fields exist. Ducks. Lambs. But Bambi? Bambi’s dead. Has been since 1942.

So we watch him resurrected on a cracked iPad screen in bed at 2:09am, under a weighted blanket that smells like lavender and last year. We sip warm milk, chew cinnamon apple slices shaped like hearts. We listen to Phantogram. We write fanfiction about Peter Pan’s bisexual phase. We make moodboards for the Isle of the Lost Boys. We dress up as trauma-immune fairies. Because what isn’t real can’t hurt us. Because the worlds we invent are safer than the ones that invented us. Because pixie dust never molested anyone. Because no one gets groomed in Neverland, just grown.

And I don’t blame us.

How else are we meant to survive?