The doorknob was lower than expected, not an ideal placement for someone of my stature, so I struggled to pull it open. Distant footsteps echoed in the hallways, but I couldn't be sure if they were on the same floor as me, or somewhere above me. Nobody bothered to turn on the lights, they seemed to trust the fading sunset out the windows.

A school in the late afternoon feels like something you're not meant to witness. Everything is darker than any other place, more than it has any right to be, mainly because you only know it in the bright light of morning, but it's not just atmospheric darkness, it's one of missing bodies, of halted purpose. It's not only dark because the sun is going down, but because the place has been deactivated, turned off, dismissed until the next morning someone who doesn't want to be here turns it back on, and this small world is repopulated for a handful of hours you could otherwise miss, oversleeping; what a strange thing, to miss a world while sleeping.

But for now it was cloaked in darkness that, albeit very dark, felt more like extinguished brightness, with these walls that seemed less real now, a familiar place that didn't belong to me anymore, the residual presence still warm in the absence of life, and the echoes of emptiness through the hallways resonating with voices of memories, the only residents of a head that felt just as light, and empty, and foggy as this liminal world.

I stepped out and shut the door behind me, I was getting the feeling someone or something had been lurking in the shadows, and I needed to use the restroom, when my eye caught the deck that overlooked the yard. I climbed the stairs, three at a time, with just the tip of my toes, and I recognized the pattern of the tiles on the deck; I was here before, a long time ago that never felt that long, and if they'd told me at the time I would one day cover the whole deck in three steps, I would've thought the world was mine. I could remember running across the deck to reach the metal railing, with horizontal lines that looked like a wrestling ring's ropes, and climbing them in the corner to pose like they did on TV, as if celebrating a victory, only to be pulled back down and be scolded for the dangers of falling, god forbid my head should crack open. Now the sole of my foot covered all four of the horizontal lines, the railing as high as my knee; this was a world made for small humans.

I put my foot down, no posing allowed, no imaginary victories to account for. If only they'd let me celebrate more when the world was my size.