Oh, you can be so very sharp.  Someday I fear you might cut me to pieces.

We cannot come away without embedded thorns.  A goat head or two.  They sting, these sharp things, but I have yet to refrain from wandering thorny paths, for along these paths I find strength and resilience even as I bleed.  Am I not made more beautiful by the bits or torn flesh?

I tell myself that, but can't say that I feel it.  The tiny cuts inflicted externally by way of a condition of being, the everyday bullshit categorized within the realm of common circumstance that the Russians refer to as byt, are endless.  It is a broad term, applied to the everyday existence of the hoards of people struggling to survive in a cruel world.  A shared struggle.  We all fall down, sustain and inflict injuries, fall victim to chaos and come away damaged.  We are all kicked when we're down. We're all fucking sad, scared, angry, and fragile, a result of not only major catastrophes in our lives, but also the thousands of endurance tests we are faced with on a daily basis as we are forced into ill-fitting constructs.  Some of us have a particularly difficult time conforming to these constructs, and some of us are just diseased.

Dolly

Elsa was dead.  She was not still, or resting peacefully.  She conducted herself through her living death within the tomb of a dingy apartment atop an old building, which had long housed a bar and billiards room on its bottom level.  Thursday through Sunday, like a drone, she clambered down old stairs at 6 pm to serve beer and bourbon to a room full of unmentionables, just another one of the faceless human beings. She could smile little false smiles and transport drunkenness about the room, she could collect a few tips, receive a paycheck and write checks to pay her bills, but there was no life in her anymore.  Her face would always be a pretty face, and there were indeed advances from the drunks though they never looked above her neckline, but she always quietly declined and retreated.  They had known subconsciously that she was dead, so there was little pursuit.  How can one look into dead eyes with any interest?  How can one see a transparent being, consisting of nothing but shades of the ashen, as anything but the ghost she is?  She was left alone to live out her death, and try not to remember her life before this end.  

Like dead flesh, Elsa felt nothing.  Not breathing in or out, or a beating pulse.  There was nothing circulating.  She felt an absence where here heart should be, a hollow cavity in her chest.  The upside to that is that it doesn’t hurt the way it used to.  It’s just not there.  It broke one day, for the last time, and every last piece must have disintegrated.  It must have dried up and turned to dust, before it ever should have rightly been so.  She couldn’t believe that it turned to stone, because the cavity felt much too empty.  There was a time when the weight crushed down upon her, but now there was a hollow void, in her chest and in her eyes.  She rarely looked in any mirror.  What she found looking back at her was a warped, transparent girl with no color left, one with the face of a corpse that she could see right through.  Her life had been all sharp edges and poisonous words, and little by little her spirit began trickling out of all the torn places.  

♥♥♥

She began alone, and remained so.  From an early age she was beaten down and stepped upon.  She was a pretty girl, but like a ghost. Few people really saw her, acknowledged her existence, and when they did the stones and arrows and words came flying.  Her internal edifice, like her skin, was pale and soft, easily pierced.  Once it all started, she never really had a chance.  She walked around, invisible, and full of invisible bruises, welts, and gashes, full of piercing shrapnel.  She learned to keep her face down, and not look lift her eyes, for what they see they do not ever understand.  

Don’t make them look.  They will hate me.  

She wondered if she had been born damned.

On a cloudy day in her 18^th year, Elsa sat on a crate in the back alley behind a coffee shop where she cleaned tables and dishes, reading a book when she heard footsteps echoing in the alley.  She didn’t look up.  She never did. 
He stopped near her, his shoes below her, dull and black.  Sitting still, waiting for them to move away or to enter the back door of the shop.  They stayed, however, for several minutes which felt like several years, and on that day she met the only person who had ever really seen her.  He was a tall, thin man, with pale skin and pale hair, but his eyes were dark and bright at the same time, like a star shining in a black sky.   He sat down next to her, offering a smile, and her life began again and ended on that same day.  If she had never looked up, do as she was supposed to do, perhaps she would still be alive.  But her eyes found his face.  He drew her in like the moths to the flowers in the dusk of summer nights.  His darkness captured her, and she was never free again.  

He was beautiful.  No one else would think so, it was just for her.  

“He is transparent, like me,” she thought to herself. “but there is a star inside him.”
An unconscious monstrosity of a man, he saw that she was already broken, because she had raised her eyes and allowed him access to the forbidden. Her own personal demon had found her, and the first time he saw her, he could taste her essence.  Like a vampire, he drank her dry from the first moment, and it was a ghastly love.

She was exactly what he needed, so he took her hand and led her away into a dream, and she became a parody.  Through it all, she never knew his name.

Elsa became a monstrosity herself, he made her a monster, knowing that she had already crossed an invisible line of the wretched.  There was a spectral choker around her neck, and she belonged to him.  He put her in the costumes he found suitable, and she lived in a doll house, which was indeed born from a dream, so full it was of intoxicating magic.  Her face was a gruesome contrast of pale skin, purple bruises and dried blood, like the red of her smiling lips.  She knew he was devouring her with his desideratum, and had no doubt that he loved her for it.  She saw it in his starry eyes, and felt it in his brutality.  It was so easy for him to make her what he wanted.  She was his dolly, and she saw how beautifully complete he was, as he saw how tragically incomplete she would always be.  It was the most obscene balance, and she had no choice but to love fiercely.  It would come to be the last thing she ever felt, and then one day, he disappeared.

She stayed in the doll house for a time, and then she walked away.  Taking what seemed useful, she made her way steadily in a new direction, which brought her to moderately sized town, where she found a sign in a window stating “Help Wanted.”  She answered the call, and began her living death anew.

Thus we arrive once again at the starting point.  What has been accomplished? Nothing but a brief history, and for Elsa, nothing but an interminable demise.  There she was, in a colorless place where no one really noticed her lack of color.  And there she stayed for several months, though time had long since lost all meaning.  Sometimes she would allow her thoughts to commence, but it would only lead to her thinking how little the need, how little it mattered.  There was nothing to feel, and nothing to think about.  She had no alchemy to alter her state, the preference was to wish for stillness inside.  Sadly, however, rest is fleeting.

Too late.

It was a shop like many others visited over the years, but I found there a tenuous frequency.  As though lingering from the chime of an overhead bell that rang upon entrance, a cautious appeal hung in the air, inviting me on like the phantom aromas of old time cartoons.  I smiled in opposition at the scowling proprietress looming over her counter, who only acknowledged me with a nod before turning her gaze downward, and was struck by the absurd feeling that this was quite unfamiliar territory.

             Carefully and quietly I advanced, picking my way through rows of sideboards, dresser drawers, vanities, and pie cabinets.  Upon each surface was a scattering of objects in just about any embodiment imaginable, as long as they were to be found in an early to mid-century ladies’ domicile.  Boxes of costume jewelry, stacks of old books, strings of skeleton keys, formidable baby dolls, pillbox hats and sewing notions are the standard inventory of such emporiums.  Though I pay them respect for simply being what they are, these things need magic to satisfy my craving for obscurity.  Profound procurement is rare and bitter-sweet.  Any object I adopt must have certain properties, and it must speak to me.   If it has no evident story, I need to concoct one for it, which is by no means an easy task if the thing refuses to concede.  Some things, however, do more than just speak.  They acquire me, even when they refuse me.

            I continued along the labyrinthine trail of concrete and seasoned remains, and had nearly made it back to my starting point when my foot knocked against something, the corner of which protruded from beneath an old hoosier cabinet.  That initial frequency which greeted me at the door had not subsided, and actually seemed to increase the moment I looked down upon the thing I had nudged.  Unconsciously, I was sinking to my knees, reaching for it.  Pulling it from beneath its hiding place, I found that it was a small chest covered with dust.  Old, rusted, deteriorating, it was locked up and had no discernible weight aside from that of its construct materials.  I felt a slight, buzzing discomfort as my hands rested on its edge, and I made as if to push it back into its original place, but at the same time felt an urge, a need to open it.  I released two stubborn draw bolts, lifted the lid, and found a little man inside.

            A wooden man with a face of crackling paint, eyes peculiarly bright, wearing a frown and a dusty brown suit.  He lay dreadfully composed, emitting the deepest lament, resting in that box as if he was finished with everything.  A wave of vertigo overtook me and I could only seem to focus on his face, seized by it, held fast by what I saw there.  I felt fear, but wanted to touch him, tried to reach further.   As my hand drew near him, an ache grew rapidly from the bones of my fingers up into my chest, and I thought my heart had stopped.  He stole my breath, taking it from my lips while forming it into his own whisper:  Too late, dolly.

Now, I am first to admit that my mind can be fitful, and this aberration settles me on the far side of normal.  I search not for dead things, but for things that communicate after being broken or discarded.  Things with perceptible spirit.  I may have been accused of unreasonably assigning life to inanimate objects, but those accusers lack spirit themselves, and scarcely weaken my resolve.  The little man – he was a source of this “eccentricity”, and the simultaneous negation of that very term.  I heard him, and felt him like nothing I’ve felt before.  He was the embodiment of all that I search for, but as I reached for him his anguish was thrust upon me with such finality that I fell back against the shelf behind me and brought a shower of ancient spice tins down upon my head.  He had somehow pushed me, shoved me back and away from him.

Trembling, crying, feeling as if an invisible hand had a death grip on my heart, I sat starting at the man for a long moment, until the shopkeeper appeared at the end of the aisle a few feet away.  She regarded me with some combination of anger and concern, but said nothing as her eyes fell on my face.  Her face softened ever so slightly as she came to my side and gently closed the lid, locking it in place and sliding back underneath the cabinet.  I watched her do so in horror, wanting to scream at her to stop, to tear her arms away.  I wanted to see him, to keep him, but he had been kept too long, forgotten, and was resigned to his decay.  His story came to me in an instant, and I knew that he had not always been made of wood, but he was now beyond living in the light.  For us both, it was too late.

The woman looked down upon me, pulled me up by the arm, and promptly herded me up the aisle to the front of the store.  “You need to go,” she said as she produced a box of tissue from behind her perch.  I could not tell pity from anger on her face as I struggled to orient myself again.  I didn’t know how to leave.  His whisper still echoed within me.  I could still feel him and could hardly resist going back, but I quietly forced myself to exit the store, knowing that I should not return.

That pain has never left me, so in a sense, I do keep him.  Embedded in my heart is a shard of utter hopelessness, due not only to his state of being, but also to his benign intent.  The shove was not malicious, which only makes it sharper.  This incredible encounter has been a profound lesson, as was his rejection of the world outside of his box.  I have come to explore things with a greater understanding of my own nature and with more consideration than I had in the past, finding myself increasingly hesitant to concede to the world's understanding of anything.  I am sad, and sorry, but grateful for all the little things.  For stories, and the lessons of the forgotten.  Gratitude only comes after we’ve been brought to our knees, subjects of inconceivable truth.