He looked between us once more and said, "It's either her or me..."

I'm very aware it sounds like some silly fairytale, but it's the truth. Just a page from the cruel chapters of reality.

I think I'd better clear up a few things first...

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You’re standing here, and I think you can see three people. Me, him, that girl.

She’s ten. She doesn’t look anything like someone who can take it on, at least I tell myself that. I hate to admit it, but she bears resemblance to me, but with those red eyes and that wild red hair, now tied into a ponytail. But she concentrates on him, ignoring all sanity, saying she’s got to go.

So yes, I don’t want her to go. It sounds selfish of me, but I want to try it. Face it. I've been waiting for it half my life, perhaps more, but yes, I want to. The girl steps up. Picks up her backpack from the floor. Somehow scoops it up and hinges it on her shoulder, as if it will help. She looks strangely confident.

Now there’s the concern of the man. He’s letting her, dropping the “either you or me” thing, saying it’s best if she went. It’s madness, letting a girl go like that, although maybe I’m saying this because I want to be the one going right now. I want to be stepping through that door, whatever there is on the other side.

She’s smiling, as if she’s just going to some market fair and not as if she knows she’s definitely not surviving. A toss of her hair. A flash of a brilliant smile. One final wave, one final mock-brave salute, and then she’s gone.

With a flash of madness and a dash of desperation, I push my way against the crowds, the hordes of people watching. The girl is a bright-red speck in the distance by the time I wrench open the door. She’s petrified, I think, and it’s not her fault.

Don’t call out to me like that, don’t grab me and say stop. I might be impulsive, yes, but you don’t need to stop me from saving the people I love. No, not that girl, someone in there. This is what it's supposed to be. I reach out, just jump into the next world. Gasps ring from the crowd, but they are but noise to me. I slam the door shut and take a moment to look at this new place, metallic and shimmering with a sort of eerie silence. There’s a lot of people, standing around as if in a dream, standing around as if they were statues in a grand palace. Confused. Lost souls whom I can't do anything to help.

I don’t know where that girl is anymore. I don’t care. I push my way through the people and the mock-ancient columns, push my way through the surreal, the blurred lines. And I see the one person I’ve always wanted to see.

See, for the last thirteen years, ever since I saw Iris pass through that door, I’d wanted to go. I’d even screamed and clutched and wailed my way to the very entrance. I was still a kid then, probably no older than three or four, and she herself was only 12, strikingly similar to that girl, but with the most beautiful and bright eyes I'd ever seen, opposed to that girl's freaky red ones. And Iris, my sister, was standing there, in the very middle of that room, still exactly the way she was when I had seen her over a decade ago. She seemed so old back then, a lighthouse, but now she seems fragile, like she could topple over any moment.

Iris has quite some style, unlike that girl. She’s wearing a new outfit, I think, an emerald-studded gown tied with a sash, and her golden-brown hair’s braided neatly, with a crimson-red ribbon nestled in the braids. She looks at me, with that same expression from when I scribbled on the wall as a toddler - a look of surprise, disdain, and love. Her turquoise eyes light up, the way they once did when I gave her yet another noodle-artwork.

For the first time in thirteen years, Iris and I looked at each other.

“You… You’re older!”, she exclaimed, her words stuttering and stumbling over each other, yet the confident and mature tone that I remembered from my babyhood, ever my Iris. She looked down at herself, perfect and poised and mature, but still twelve. I, on the other hand, now feel like the older one. I’ve been waiting all these years to see my elder sister, and I have to be the elder one?

I sat down on the ground, exasperated, and let the toddler in me rush back in. Iris sits down as well, right on the marble floor, careful not to tear the opulent fabric of her gown, seeming much more mature than her twelve years. Once again, I’m aware of how I’m acknowledging her as younger and younger, as if she were like that girl. I'm aware that I'm the Iris here now.

“Hey”, she said, bringing me back to our childhood games, where's she's the big one. “It’s okay. Don’t worry”. It might’ve looked a little odd, but she, after all, had been my older sister once. It didn’t matter that I was towering over her now, her with the delicate glass-marble eyes. Suddenly, laughter erupted, breaking the precious little silence we had shared. It was that girl. My cousin.

“Are you like, three again or something?”, she asked between fits of hysteria, very rather appropriately for the time and situation.

We both ignore her. I scoop her up, my big sister. She’d always been a bit small for her age, and with my lanky arms and legs, I could pick her up easily. She’s pale, too tired. She doesn’t really seem to know how many years have passed since she went through that door. I wouldn’t blame her, really.

Maybe if I’d never let her go I would have the twenty-five-year-old Iris instead, have an Iris throughout my childhood instead of reassurance and fake wide smiles. But she’s still my sister, although maybe my little sister now. She’s fainted, poor girl. It’s strange how weirdly I’m thinking now, as if I’m the parent here rather than the tiny thing that had clung onto her leg, desperate for reassurance.

I get my little cousin, that girl, to come, and we go back through the door, back to the regular world.

What I didn’t account for was that I had also gone through the Iris effect.

I pushed open the door, where a new crowd of people were waiting. Different, but the same gasps and bubbling excitement and a hint of horror.

I instinctively knew it. Thirteen years had gone by.

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I knew that girl shouldn’t have come. We had made it out back alive, but because we knew time was slower there. I asked Iris if she knew it or not, but she said it felt rather like a dream. A dream. I calmed her down and told her not to worry, and tried to cook her something.

Oh how the roles have reversed.

The cousin, that useless girl, sits by, chatting endlessly about trivial stuff. Who is this girl? (My sister, nitwit.) Why’s she so young if you knew her? (I'm not ancient. Besides, the door stops time.) How do you know her? (She's my sister, so - duh - I know her!) And turning her attention to poor Iris : What did you do in there? (I walked around a bit?) Did you go to the toilet? (No.) (Of all questions! Stop pestering my sister!) Who are the other people? (I don't know.) The endless barrage of questions interrupt the calming stillness, although perhaps it makes the room less eerie.

I don’t know where we are, and neither does Iris. Everyone knows me, however. The first person to make it out alive in twenty-six years. Twenty-six years, when the young man who came back when Iris went came back out alive, although a short time later, when he realized he’d been inside for sixty-five years, he’d faded away.

It’s tragic, yes, but I suppose my cousin and I - and Iris - are the first to come back after such a short period of time, and without much psychological discomfort, as the news called it.

Age was truly just a number now. I was supposed to be thirty, although I looked seventeen, and my Iris was still twelve years old, stuck in a world where she ought to be thirty-eight. The cousin I supposed was now twenty-three, although her brain was still on par with any ten-year-old's.

Yes. It’s right.

You are there, and you are twenty-three by now, no longer that 10-year-old staring on with clueless eyes. Surely you will understand how much Iris means to me, understand it’s much bigger than what you are seeing now. Surely you will understand how that young man didn’t age in sixty-five years, and how his predecessor remained fourteen years old for seventy-eight years. Surely you will understand that inside, decades pass in minutes, and that you would never exit unless someone comes and saves you.

It’s time to tell you everything.