Thread by @badend_doll

it becomes difficult at times to overstate the prodigious memory of the average doll.

for most of us, relationships are little lifetimes. something beautiful is born, reaches its prime, slowly declines, then experiences death.

cleansed by the grave, we're supposed to be reborn.

i didn't recognize her at all after six reincarnations -- my past lives always felt opaque to me, but nobody should be able to remember that far back. somehow, she was so certain.

we were just... third graders now, turned out to some field of dead grass in some town in colorado.

honestly, i just wanted to play some fucking freeze tag.

hardly the time to talk about what happened between us, but she insisted.

it was cold out, and i REALLY just wanted to play some freeze tag, but some doll was here to tell me what i did wrong like, seventy years ago.

so this girl with a lisp and a habit of trying to trade everything in her lunchbox for as much juice as possible starts explaining to me that nearly ten years ago, i was a dentist.

i know that much, i'm not a complete moron, but then she tells me some really weird shit.

here's the thing: in case you haven't been following, i'm in the third goddamn grade at the time. when she starts bawling on me about some cult compound in the pacific where we got shot in each others arms, i'm not just lost, i'm uncomfortable.

i remember feeling bad for her.

took two entire recesses to cover the "short version" of the story, culminating in...

some sort of innocuous coffeeshop romance, almost two hundred and ninety years ago.

i'm fuzzy on the details now, but she was really upset about some sort of love triangle?

i think i gave her an inferiority complex by dating the wrong person after her.

after everything was said, she stood there staring at me, cheeks red with cold, glowering with the release of it all.

i remember asking her what she wanted from me, here, now.

from some dumb kid wearing shorts in september, with a book report due on friday.

the power she seemed to have a moment before, it kind of just... crumpled.

she apologized so quietly i almost thought i imagined it, then walked home early.

that girl stopped coming to school.

twenty years later, i haven't been able to stop thinking about her. she was the sort of shy somebody who only knew about a third of us on a first name basis, i don't even have that much left of her.

i wasn't ready for her words at the time, but...

right now, i'm just having a hard time imagining what it's like to live like that, to die like that.

dolls are just stuck with the pain, a broken piece of the cycle lodged in their side as they march forward.

i don't know how much of her i could have held, if she told me all that at the right time, but i wish i hadn't left her alone with this unintentional emotional perpetuity she's been sentenced to.