Good Bye # 23-23

Good Bye # 23-23

Passing the last doll with a pacifier, I felt a weight begin to slide off me. Maybe it was some kind of self induced spiritual protection, or just maybe the weight of what I learned from encountering the doll man’s life about the dolls. I neared the giant four by four and lifted myself up into a fortification and heard the rumble of the engine. I rolled down the window and looked back while idling and thought. The doll man has no way out of this community without just committing himself to leaving. Where would he go I wondered. Maybe back to his youth in the Brooklyn Ship Yard of his youth, or back to Long Beach California perhaps. He’s too old to haul one hundred pound stems of bananas, or coffee bean bags off ships in the harbor. Immigration would give him an impossible time if he tried to re-enter the United States with old faded immigration papers saying he is an American Citizen.

The doll man stands in his doorway, not crossing the imaginary line to what I call freedom while watching me with a faint smile worn on his face. In his posture standing in juxtaposition with his physical environment, I see a little glimmer of resolution for a person living along a very steep road. There simply is no return. Life ends here.

Just maybe a young woman with child will come into his life that needs shelter, attracted by the net of dolls that one could say in his community possesses a spell of faith would reveal love and reinsurance, and that her experience in life is really not about abuse. Her child no matter their condition will also find the warmth of a community regardless traditional beliefs. The other is in time his love for his wife is answered when he’s finally placed with her ashes and released in the eternal stream that runs into the Pacific Ocean in a days journey underneath the blessings of a good celestial night blanketed of stars so his true love can find their way again.

All that will remain is the memory and story, His house picked clean by community scavengers, and in time decay itself and return to the earth pulled down my the moss, and vines.