CLAY DOLL

By Haleigh Hook

 

Clay doll, echoing in your frame. Framed in a window, watching the world through warped glass. Everything on mute, only knowing what had been built inside of you. No words running through your head, but colours you couldn’t name. Warmth you couldn’t describe and darkness that you could taste. You forced the only words you knew out a long time ago, leaving yourself alone in there.

 

Loneliness glasses your eyes as all you can do is watch. Watch what? The temperament of days that fade into nights, the world is there to be your entertainment. What do you choose to focus your intense interest on? Whose life will you live today?

 

Will it be the man with gloved hands? His collar protects the world from seeing the goosebumps that bedazzle his neck. His strength is a funnel that drains into tentative tiptoes. No. You will not be him, he’s a blur in your reality that doesn’t offer what you want the most. A face, the warmth of recognition. A smile in a sea of idle eyes and barren backs. What it feels like to relax your tensions after a long day and find comfort in familiarity. You will never know him. There are some things you’ll never know, it’s one of those facts of life people never want to accept. Except for you, you accepted it long ago, didn’t you? With a steel frame around your worldview, what choice do you have but to watch? 

 

As the snow falls outside you feel as though you are inside a snow globe. Maybe it’s the ice that held you frozen at the seams for so long. Banging on the glass, for what? To be heard, or for it to break? But your joints are stiff and unmoving so instead, you are watching the snow fall and the only thing you can do is wonder what it is called. Wonder what it would feel like. 

You fill up inside so slowly like the sand of an hourglass yet you’ll never run out of time. Oh poor clay doll, your smile is fading. Your woollen hair is losing colour. Your flushed cheeks are aching, a smile sewn in place, dragging the seams down until they burst and leave you spilling all over the floor.

 

You reek. You smell of fossilised dust, of a lifetime of sitting on the windowsill, of fear; adrenaline and gulped air. Maybe it was pressed into you from the fingers that moulded your simple shape. Her fingerprints left lazily sprinkling your skin and a piece of her heart there, too. In you, in that room. You see the unique canyons holding you together while they tear you apart and you think. Endlessly. About those little fingers that made ladybugs colossal and picture book galleries. About how those fingers stayed small but, in one day, the person inside grew up. Instantly, with a snap of those little fingers. The same fingers that held you like you were a china doll instead of dull clay, the same soft fingers that put you on the window sill and left you there forever. You wonder to yourself, how could someone else choose to make them grow up. You’ve wondered for so long that you extended your search out into the world. 

 

You know why you look out the window. What it is that watches over your shoulder. What it is you try not to see. You sit on the top bunk, looking out the window so you don’t see the room. You don’t see it, but you hear it. You hear it all the time, don’t you? 

“Are you big enough to get onto the top bunk? I thought you were a big kid now.” 

You didn’t know what it meant and neither did she, but you both soon figured it out and it haunts you. Fills your stomach with tar fingers that grip your throat and keep you quiet. Quiet now like you were then. So, you fixated on the outside world in the hope you’d forgot what the words led to. Here you are, studying a world looking for hope. Is that what you find? When you watch the crowds and the clouds and the mosaics of light on the sidewalk. Artwork fading away with the sun and becoming reenvisaged in the moonlight. Every day looks the same, you begin to recognise people you’ll never know. Until…

 

Now and then you see her again. In the bobbing pigtails, in the coats held closed in concealment, in the grimaces in response to greetings. You see all these young girls getting forced into women every day. How are they so different from the man with gloved hands? Is it because it was only the cold that sent shivers down the spine of a man, but it is man that sends shivers down the spine of women? Is it because the idea of living his reality doesn’t shake you? The only voice you’ve ever heard is that of a man’s, saying words you wish you’d never heard. You never understood them, never understood what being a ‘big girl’ was. Light voices carry heavy words that float like dandelion seeds and land like bombs. Once the door was closed and locked, no one dared to come back. Your joints stiffened into straight jackets so you had no choice but to sit and live with it. 

 

You’ve taken enough of the blame. Too much of it. More than you deserved. I’m not here to blame you, to feed you coal and cobwebs. You’ve eaten enough, but it won’t digest. Your tongue rots in your gut, having bitten it long ago. 

 

Claws digging into your shoulders and whispers digging into your ears. Burrowing their way and echoing in your head, the voice decrescendos but remaining tacked onto the back of your skull. Mimicking innocent confusion and selfish adolescence smashing delusions. There are some things you will never know, that is true. But, poor clay doll, what’s worse is the things you wish you'd never found out. The things you do not choose to know. The things moulded into your mind by greedy hands, forcing the knowledge into your soul, your DNA. You are what you know, but what you know is not up to you. It hurts, doesn’t it?