just_writing | (no subject)

This is a piece (currently untitled) that I've been working on that I'm reading for a class on Friday. Any feedback and criticism would be very appreciated.

While I was a small boy, sitting on the dusty floor in short pants within a room with the lingering aroma of burnt cigarettes my mother would give me a stack of nested wooden dolls, she had carried with her from her homeland, Russia.

When I was small I never wanted to play with them.

Their intricately painted and gilded features seemed to mock me, why would I, a five year old boy, want to play with his mother’s nested dolls she had carried with her from her homeland?

When I was small I had few toys and no other children to play with.

The sun would filter through the unraveling curtains and reflect off the dust motes that floated.

I would open the largest doll, then the next largest, until finally I would reach the smallest one within the centre. I would take this doll out and set it aside.

Alone.

It was small with a jagged scratch running across it’s wooden face. Sometimes I wish I had been the one to scratch the doll, I had been the one to drag a brutal edge against it’s mocking face.

When I was five and three quarters my father went away. At this time my mother retrieved a dusty box from a closet shelf and gave it to me.

Within were a pair of delicately painted wooden shoes.

When I was small I sat and cried because my toys consisted of aging relics from my parents history, a life they had before me, before so much greyness.

When I was small I cried because my father was physically absent and my mother was mentally on leave.

Once when I was small I wore the wooden shoes clip-clopping through the flat. Through the spiraling dust motes caressing my face and settling upon the strands of my hair. Until I fell and cracked my head on the edge of the table.

I threw those wooden shoes down the cellar stairs.

In 1989 I didn’t cry anymore because I wasn’t a boy. I was an angry young man and I’d shoot anything into my flesh, snort anything up my nose, smoke anything that would burn, and fuck anything remotely human that still moved.

When I was a young man I’d steal the money from my mothers wallet and stalk the streets to find my next fix which wasn’t so much an addiction but a smokey, glimmering reminder of my existence. A daily reminder that I grew to thrive on that did indeed remind me that I was
alive.

When I was an angry juvenile I used my mothers wooden nested dolls she had carried with her from her homeland to stash a range of drugs in.

The small doll, through much patience and care, was lovingly carved to take perfect sublime hits off of.

I’d lay half on half dangling off of my bed with the patchwork quilt detailed with small orange ducks smiling an inane smile to myself or my latest companion and dizzily watch the dust motes drifting.

Once upon a time a wall went up and it only took twenty years
for people to realise that the wall could come back down. And indeed
that wall came tumbling down.

When I was an adolescent I took a chance when I could find one.

Now I am a man.

I wake up in the morning. Shower. Brush my teeth. Dress… always saving my tie for last. Drink a cup of coffee. Go to work. Come home. Rinse and repeat.

No dolls. No shoes. Nothing to show where I’ve been outside of the rare and odd dream of floating dust motes dancing and spiraling through the air of a sun lit bedroom.