story #6: the dollhouse

location: home, 34-- rue de bullion

Often I find my time spent unknowingly, my intention spent vacantly, as I sit and wonder what it is that I did all this time to occupy this free time of mine. Sometimes, the city is forgotten when the noise and busy of the resident’s head takes over instead. This is the metaphor of this thought:

In the dollhouse, I raise my torso off the ground. I exclaim to the brick walls and the drywalls: "What is my role in here?" For I have this unfortunate irony that my character sheet spells me "stubbornly inquisitive about the nature of her being" paired with the "perpetual forgetting of her short-term memory." With this, I hope my caricature be painted in strong enough of a brush to doll your imagination of this dollhouse I seem to have found myself in.

It was 4 o'clock of the late afternoon on 19 Prince Arthur Ouest. A winter's darkening blue, bright enough to harmonize with the yellow streetlights behind the falling snow. We shuffle onto the bench that had known us well since the summer (when we'd sit with the sun on our skin and foundational peace in our questions for the world): we sit with the moon and our skin covered except for a crescent of a smile under our masks. It is where we fall in a conversation about the owner's latest dinner creations, the news that curfew is back in order, and the potential discovery that his partner has met my partner, accidentally, when attempting to call me through the stranger's phone on Saint-Laurent. Here, I believe, my character was given a role to play; and so, I sit in content.

It was 9 o'clock of the mid-morning on 4021 St-Laurent. The centre of the centre of my chest's pain had entirely faded. On the verge of negative, we took a walk for coffee. I had waited outside as his auburn scarf moved horizontally behind the glass door. In the period of 2 filters being poured, I had seen 2 pairs of identical dogs: 2 pugs and 2 of an unidentified breed. As dolls ourselves, our characterizations were written to each have a twin of our own. I see this as the signature of the author who foreshadowed the necessity of our company being forever with one another, not with my own twin nor with his own twin, but the fraternal twins unfathomably identical to one another. Here, I believe, our characters were given the scene to dissolve into; and as on script, out he walks with our 2 filters. 

It is 2 o'clock of the passing noon on 34-- De Bullion. I am chasing the sun moving across the table like the cat chasing her toy over snowy boots and under closet doors. When uneasy, I throw the fish into the pond of thought and imagine what I can find to toy with in reflection, what I can find to amuse with in time's passing. What I find is the hardwood table collecting shadows where thought trips in hesitation. My journal in the corner where I started, now a meter away as if my typing wore it off the script that I supposedly was dictated by. I find that I have gone missing, as if forgotten in where I should have stood, had I followed my character to the final point and realized that my planned character was one of complete flaw. Instead, at least I believe I have found, my character propped up quite straight, up at the desk with her fingers typing of the depth of what shadows she has tripped in the past days of darkened skies.

She is still in the dollhouse, a doll written to watch the bricks and the paint. She has the unfortunate irony of a stubbornly inquisitive temperament diluted with the perpetual forgetting of her short-term memories. She has no clue what she has done, how she has kept her time, nor how she is to spend her approaching spare time. She believes she had mistakenly been written to be a character in this play; "No," she says, "I must have something more to say."

And so, in the dollhouse I raise my torso off the ground. I exclaim to the brick walls and the drywalls: "I do not know why I am here. But I shall write, for it is the only thing I feel I can do."

And one day she will discover that the final sentence of her character sheet reads: "But above all, she is a writer: before a daughter, before a lover. With her stubborn curiosity and a mixture of forgetting, she thought purpose was out of reach. One day, she might just discover that what she was looking for was not in a role to be written, but in the play of her character who, soon enough, began to improvise beyond her script."