You are Rapunzel fresh out the tower.

You are watching a horror movie with your friends. The monster of the story is Gothel—not really, but in a metaphorical sense you understand how a monster can be a monster and a mother.

“This doesn’t make sense,” your friends are jeering at the screen. “Is she dumb? How has she lived eighteen years not knowing something’s wrong with her mother?” You think back to how it was only last year that your mother told you about her childhood. You, a few years older than this movie-daughter, crying your eyes out as your mother painstakingly explained where each rock of the tower came from.

You think back to the tower. You think back to all the signs you missed of your mother being a monster. You think back to all the signs you missed of your mother being a human. When your friends ask again, “how has she not realized?” you think back to how you watched your mother cry as she said, “I wanted to protect you. I didn’t tell you to protect you.”

You defend the character and your friends give a lackluster “I guess that does make sense” but then the next scene rolls around and they are once again perplexed by the character doing something you understand in a way more like a birthright than a learned behavior.

“This character doesn’t make any sense,” they continue to say and in their words you hear an echo back: “why are you always like this? Why are you like this?” Because I was raised in a tower, you want to say, but no one here really knows what a tower is, so you stay silent the rest of the movie. When the movie ends, you watch your friends give it one or two star ratings while you quietly give it four.

You are Rapunzel fresh out the tower. Being a born citizen doesn’t seem to negate being the daughter of a foreigner and you still follow the same habits you did back in the tower.

“Why are you always cleaning?” Your friends ask you this as you vacuum the floors for the third time this week. Because the tower was always dusty, you want to say, but you do not live in a tower anymore so the answer doesn’t make any sense. Because the tower was filled with mice, you want to say, but no one here really knows what a tower is, so you just shrug and continue to vacuum.

English is your first language, but your mother tongue and mother’s tongue do not overlap so sometimes your words do not contain the same substance you fill it with. The rules of the tower are not the same as the rules of the world outside the tower and you have realized very early on that asking what the rules are only leads to perplexed and disdained looks.

“It’s just common sense,” people say. “Do I really need to spell it out for you?” You want to say yes but you’re starting to get tired so instead you just start assuming others are always right and your discomfort is just muscle memory of the rules of the tower. You’re out of the tower now, you tell yourself. If you want to live outside of a tower, you cannot keep walking in the same patterns of the tower.

So you let your friends keep their shoes on in your apartment and you let your friends open your cupboards and you let strange men kiss you if they say you’re pretty first and sometimes you miss the tower but you don’t say that last one out loud because you were the one who wanted to leave the tower in the first place. And so you don’t say that last part, but you still vacuum the floors as soon as everyone leaves and you close all your cupboards and you have a panic attack in the bathroom after he leaves and maybe the muscle remembers the break even when the bone has forgotten.

You are Rapunzel, but you are also the prince. You spend your whole life waiting for someone, anyone, to save you from the tower but eventually you realize no one is coming so you throw yourself out the window. And just like how the prince is blinded by thorns in the original fairytale, you are flailing blindly in a world that expects you to understand it. You are Rapunzel, being guided around this world that does not understand you, and you are the prince, expected to understand a world he cannot see.

“I don’t know how to be a person,” you try to tell people, but what you really mean is “I don’t know how to live somewhere larger than a tower.”

“I don’t know how to be a person,” you tell people, and they say “what do you mean? You already are.”

You are Rapunzel and you are seeing the entire sky for the first time in your life. You are Rapunzel and the sheer size of the blue, not framed by a small tower window, feels overwhelming enough to crush your tiny heart into pieces

You are Rapunzel fresh out the tower.