The Autobiography Of A Doll House

Being me, you get pushed around a lot, in the same house. For starters, when you’re bought in one magnificent cardboard box which is mostly covered in tape, you don’t have the space to move. Then you’re left wrapped in a closet for a week. When finally the birthday of that sweet seven year old daughter comes, who’s been asking for a doll house since she was five, you get assembled. Its funny because before that your only purpose was to pose for the customers. Now you are in the real world filled with fake people and fake cutlery left in charge of a seven year old who thinks she can control the whole world inside you just because she has life.

It all started at the night of her birthday, I fully formed inside her room. My friends have mostly being pink and pastels, I’ve never understood the reason why but it makes us look pretty. The little girl thinks that pink is the colour for cowards so she hit me with her bat and ran out of her room. Haven’t I suffered enough being jammed into trucks and storage units and compact shelves where you don’t even have room for breathing. Now I lay here, exhausted, my roof on the floor and windows shattered. I could hear her cry from the basement, her mom came upto me, fixed me, mumbled something about how difficult she is and then left. I only saw them after an hour, at her bedtime, when her mother came and tucked her in and sang her a song. I do not understand how quickly humans change their mind. After she left, the little girl came up to me with her doll, she liked telling her stories to her. She put it inside one of my rooms, and made her drink tea. I heard her talking about how her mother made her cry but she wanted a doll house when she was five, now she just wanted a swing set like all the other kids in her school. At least swing sets are not pink she said. I probably don’t understand this but this kids are never happy with what they have. Then she started talking about how she made a boy cry today, she sounded really proud. She slept near my foot while talking.

Its been almost two months since I’ve lived here. I’ve lost a few pieces and broken a couple of edges but I’ve grown to like this girl. She still tells the doll, stories from her day. Sometimes they are just an incident which she thinks are funny. Sometimes she talks about how she feels about mom. She once told me that mom had a similar doll house while growing up and that she wanted her to have one too. Mom comes and cleans me sometimes and I wonder if mom ever talked about her life to her doll house.

I’ve been pushed to an attic inside a box which smells like rotten onions. The little girl isn’t little anymore. Its been ten years and she’s off to high school now. She doesn’t even remember me anymore. She has started wearing baggy clothes and her mom keeps asking her to wear dresses. She comes home crying everyday because she doesn’t have any friends. The doll is also packed inside of the same box as mine. I wish she could talk to us, I liked listening to her stories. But her mom told her when she was thirteen that its not socially acceptable for you to play with dolls anymore. I didn’t understand. She cried in the room that day and didn’t come and talk to us. It was our goodbye. I wonder what she felt about us. She then got a computer when she was thirteen and played games with guns and bikes on it. She never struck me as a violent person, I guess we can never tell.

She has grown up and moved out now. I’m glad that she took me with her. She lives in another country now. I haven’t heard mom’s voice in a really long time. She used to give her chocolate milk every morning. Now all she drinks is coffee in the morning and some clear liquid at night. She has cut all her hair and still wears baggy clothes. She looks like the driver who delivered me to her old house. She opened my box the other day, it was filled with dead insects and moss. She cleaned me up and put me inside a room which was yellow in colour. I liked it. In the next week, the room flooded with more toys. I was the only old one there. There was a little boy this time who came into this room. He was already eight, I’ve never seen him before. I hope he tells me stories at night.