Those days, those years, I was the happiest and I thought that they would last forever. I lied to myself that they would last forever. I remember how it seemed that Tear felt my presence and she would not part from her pink wool haired doll. She often cooked for me and she made me tea in the little cups her father and I bought for her birthday. In the end, she would drink it herself as I could not open my mouth. Sometimes she would close my hard eyelids and allow me to rest as well. Every time she made a ponytail from my hair and every time she put clasps in all colors in my hair I thought that Tear knew I was next to her. Every time she would let her sorrow out of her chest in front of me, it seemed that she knew I had not deserted her. I thought she knew when she told me about her best friend, and her first A in mathematics, and her first puppy love and her first love pang. I thought that she knew when she complained that her tummy hurt because she bled, because she had become a girl,, and she told me that she could no longer play with dolls and plastic cups and that the time had come for her to go out and hang with friends. Then Tear hung me on the wall and she started to come home later and leave me restless. I feared about my little girl every night, I kept on worrying if she would return home safe and sound, happy or crying. Sometimes, sober or tipsy, she would take me off the wall, kissed my cheeks with her lips hot like boiled chestnuts and told me that all of her secrets were inside me, and that I was her mother, her sister and her best friend. I wondered if tear knew that I was there, every time she argued with her father, she came and she complained to me, when she said that he did not understand her and that he forbade her many things, and that he worried a lot, and he shouldn’t, because she was a smart girl. Tear said that he father didn’t trust her, and I wanted to tell her that he only worried, and that he worried for two, because I was imprisoned inside a hard plastic doll. Tear told me many things. I watched her grow, laugh and cry, her heart breaking and healing again. Somehow, in some way, I felt that I was there for her, and that my plastic body melted under her touch, and that she could feel that I was alive, that I was not only a doll with slanted eyes that were like extinguished charcoal, neither looking at her nor understanding her.
Tear is crying now, and I am helpless. I try to move my arms, I try to move my legs, but I can’t. I see her turning her head and looking at me. She gets up from her bed and comes closer to me. I feel her reading my mind in my marble eyes, I feel her reading and shedding her name down her cheeks for the last time. She takes me off the wall and gets out of her room. Her father asks her where she is going. To the basement, she says. He looks at me. I see his endless love in his eyes. I love you, I say, I will always love you. He takes a second look, then looks at Tear and nods his head. He puts his hand in the pocket and then hands the basement keys to my little girl. Tear takes them and leaves the room quickly. She runs down the stairs, as if scared not to change her mind.
The keys rattle as Tear unlocks the basement door. I see it is wet. I see it is dark. It must smell like mold and memories. It must smell like oblivion. Tear goes to the corner and she looks for something in the boxes. She finds one that is half-empty and she places my body inside it. I look at her. She looks at me. I feel her name falling on my plastic face. I feel her name falling in my eyes, extinguished charcoal, and it fills them in, it mixes with the tears that I want to shed and I can not.
She wants to leave, but she comes back, takes me from the box and hugs me strong. For the last time we stand like that: Tear around my pink wool hair, and I melted inside her arms. I know it is the last time because she had hugged my body like this before I left, before I disappeared. Before I turned into plastic. Good-bye my little girl, I want to tell her, but I can’t, because my lips are frozen. Tear looks at me for the last time and she kisses my cheek. I want Tear to also close my eyes, but she doesn’t remember. She takes the box cover and lowers it slowly. I see her little face halving, getting smaller, disappearing. All of our memories pass before my dead eyes. My insides tear and Tear comes out of them. I listen to her first cry. I touch her small slimy body with my hands. Her little teeth nibble on my nipples. I hear her giggling when we swing her at the swings with her father. I hear her small footsteps when she runs to our bed in the evening because she has dreamed something bad. I smell her hair ticking my nostrils. Tear doesn’t sleep with toys anymore. She drinks tea with her friends. She doesn’t cry for me anymore, she cries for boys. Tear has grown up.
The box lid closes. The darkness presses my body like a dough. The keys rattle, they turn in the keyhole on the basement door. I hear Tear’s footsteps growing distant. I hear my little girl’s footsteps leaving me. But it doesn’t matter. This time I won’t resist. Not that I can’t. Not that I don’t want to. But sooner or later, Tear will have to grow out of my pink wool hair.