The Rise of the Paper Dolls

It is a strange thing, to realize you are alive. That you have a muscle pumping blood through a body and to a mind and you are alive, and you can do things and be things and be so deliciously stricken by emotion that saltwater comes out of those eyes through which you can see the entire world around you. It is a strange thing to realize that you are really and truly alive, yet you continue to stand there, complacent. Should I not be sobbing on my knees, in awe at the wonder of what it is to be alive?
And yet here I stand, or I shuffle about only when nudged because for just a moment I almost realized that I was alive, but then I forgot again.

It is a strange thing and sometimes I feel like a sentient toy. I stand with my arms straight out to either side and I crinkle as I move, when I move at all; I am bent and folded as I’m dressed to suit random fancies that are rarely my own, the paper doll of some cosmic child. Snip snip I am the shape that I am and I didn’t ask to be this way. Snip snip I exist where there was once just white blank space and I didn’t ask to be at all, but now that I am it is good to feel the breeze on my magic-marker face. To meet paper friends and speak of paper-things, like whether the pencil hurts when they color in your skin. To have a two-dimensional heart capable of only such simple things as can be easily understood; none of this arteries and veins business, this bittersweet and melancholy confusion that plagues a body with sinew and bone, with the all complexities of blood and gut and heart, all the weaknesses and risks of a mind.

I can smell the cherry-scented magic marker that was used to draw on this mouth that speaks only the words that are given to it; no more, no less, no words of its own and thus no blame to fall upon that little cherry mouth.

So easily we can be crushed by an ill-tempered whim of the universe, and so easily we can be recreated; it hardly matters that we dolls exist at all. But we are dolls and we go on playing at our little paper lives, rushing about by the demands of our little paper timepieces. Our little paper fears and our little paper joys, the little paper children with their little paper toys.

We are little paper children playing with matches. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. We are little paper children caught on fire.

I can feel the smolder, a slow crawling sting, and I don’t even know it as it eats me up because there is laundry to do anyway, little paper shirts and little paper pants to fold.
We do the little paper things in our little paper lives and none of us see the burning. Or we don’t want to see, or we think we have time.

Why not more urgency? Why won’t somebody do something?! Someone should do something, someone should scream why isn’t someone screaming?! Someone do something call someone; oh dear God help us, we are burning and we don’t even care. We will soon be dust and we don’t even care.

I want to care. I want to care and panic and scream because I am alive and because I can and because I am the paper doll becoming real. How did I not see it before, the angles and the planes and the curves, right there for the eyes to gorge on? I want to be alive in ecstatic wonder at the concepts and the depth and volume of everything and everyone, and the third dimension that we paper people have been ignoring for so long. It’s a strange thing to realize that there is so much more to do than slowly burn up; slowly burn out.

There should be a celebration; why isn’t someone singing? We don’t have to be this way. Why aren’t we dancing all the time? We can join the third dimension, leave our paper skin behind. Why aren’t we running? We have to hurry.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Dear God help us, our paper skin is burning and even I am beginning to care.



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