HeatMarie

“One day, you won’t have any use for me. On that day, everything will change and you won’t want me around anymore.”

Your stare pierced through my beady eyes and found shelter somewhere in the depths of my manufactured soul. “I don’t want to keep you around because you have a ‘use’. I want to have you around because we both have decided we’d rather be in each other’s lives.”

I believed you. You made me feel for a fraction of a second that you would choose to keep me. I waited for your confirmation. I waited to hear you say that I will always have a place with you. Those words never came and as time pressed on, I sat on the shelf, waiting, waiting, waiting. 

Reaching out to you, I wanted nothing more than to express my thoughts, to elaborate on the discussion that had become more than a doll’s fear. I was sitting in the midst of its reality. 

Damn it, dolls aren’t supposed to have fears, or thoughts, or feelings. They are just dolls! 

I . . . am just a doll.

A soft sound escaped with my breath as I closed my eyes tightly, praying that in doing so it would remove me from this reality. 

Perhaps, I should be more like the creators made me: silent, mindless, caring, never feeling an ounce of grief or emotion for myself, never having a desire, put to use only to please somebody else? Maybe then you would want me? 

Your pinched lips and clenching jaw told me more than words ever could, “Do not speak another word”. 

Biting my lips, I kept quiet, forcing a swallow of pain as I watched you walk away, never looking back.

Left to nothing but the darkness of my mind, it wandered, creating lists of every possible reason for your silence: I said something wrong, did something wrong, I made you feel uncomfortable, I stepped outside of the box you built around me, I made a mistake and I need to make it right!

No, no, no, you hate apologies. I can’t do that.

Let me think, there has to be something. But did I do wrong? What wrong did I do? Maybe it’s not me, maybe it really is you? Maybe you have outgrown me? Need something more? Found something better? That is just the way it is. Humans outgrow their dolls all the time. That is not a bad thing, but still, it hurts!.

Will you ever come back? Or is all that we had lost forever?

Knowing this day would come still did not prepare me for the emptiness that took the place of you. No drawn-out plan I created thoroughly evaluated the feeling of hopelessness with the belief of being inconsequential.

How dare you make me feel this way. Wait, I . . . I didn’t mean that. It’s not you or your actions, it’s me. This is my fault for being too needy. 

Still, I wanted to scream your name and beg for you to see exactly what the mirror was telling me. I have seen what happens to dolls who have no use, they are shoved away, buried in the graveyard of old memories meant to be forgotten. 

In those memories, my anomalies captivated you as we stayed up late talking and laughing. We danced around the room without a care of how ridiculous we looked. And we looked ridiculous. Neither of us were good. Those were the moments when we were there for each other, always. 

Now, I float motionless in the current, lost in the breathless gasps for air . . . drowning. And regardless of the raptures, in this very moment, I brace myself for the unassailable silence that will follow; for the silence is more deafening without the crashing of the waves.

Like a possessed doll, I crawl out of the empty ocean you put me in, sit back down at your feet and wait patiently for you to have use for me again. Because after all, what good is a doll if they have no use? You have proven that.

I have no use . . . 

I have seen that I am broken, but I know I am not broken beyond repair. My belief is that if you see this, maybe you would help mend me back together rather than tossing me off to the side and forgetting my existence. Am I already forgotten?

Staring at you with pleading eyes, I beg for you to pick me up one last time, to see that, although frail, I am not useless! Yet, there is this fear that you will tell me that my maintenance is too exhausting for you to bear. That is why you pretend I am not there. So I sit, waiting patiently, pretending that the silence does not hurt, believing that one day you will have use for me and I will be there. Because that is what they made me for.  

But for now, I am stuck. Stuck between the desire to be used, and the desire to find my strength. To put the wonderful memories in the past and find a life that does not consist of waiting. Yet, I am manufactured to live for the needs of someone else. Without that, I am told that I feel incomplete. 

Yet, I am still lost between the worlds of living the life I was created for and the one where I find the strength to defy my pre-planned existence. Yes, I want to be weak and cry. I crave to be held, just one last time!

If I leave, if I remove myself from your presence entirely, you will forget me. You won’t remember what you called me, or the times you held me when you were lonely and scared. You’ll forget that I was there for you. And being forgotten is a torment that I am not ready to endure. 

But of what use is a doll who sits complacently on a shelf?