I do not like long introductions, so there won’t be one. There will be no introduction.
I want to escape from this world. The world wants to escape from me, but it can’t. I will help it. I like helping everyone, but nobody notices. And what they don’t notice, they don’t understand.
So. I find less beauty in life than death, like in one song. The death looks so beautiful. I have just remembered something. How I messed up that guy at school. He approached me before Math and asked, “Are you a girl or a corpse?”
I hate such people. They imagine they know everything and they are the best. They go out with fashionable-clothes hangers (comes in different shades of brown).
“I’d say I’m a corpse but I suppose you prefer them to girls, you got the idea.”
He got it. So did all people around me. So I was left alone for the rest of the recess. And by the way, the Superman himself turned to look like a corpse. Then ran to his personal (female) clothes hanger to be flattered.
I like making other people feel miserable. Because all living people make me feel miserable. In the prep school they used to call me a witch; like this was an insult. I’ve heard witches do exist. I’d like to meet one. Separated from society; just like me.
Dead people are much better. They don’t interrupt you and don’t force their opinion. Listen. I like walking in the graveyard. It’s quiet in here. I like reading people’s names on their graves and think about how they used to be. I’d like to work in a funeral service. If I grow up, of course. I’d like to sew dresses. Usually they are so beautiful. People want to see their relatives looking gorgeous for the last time. Then those dresses rot together with the bodies. Delicate temporary beauty.
I have a collection of porcelain dolls. They are all beautiful in their dresses. Sometimes I sew them by myself. The dolls were given to me by my grandmother while she was alive, for every birthday and Christmas. Grandmother herself looked like a porcelain doll with pale skin and curly hair, I saw in the pictures. Grandfather is different, bold and manly. In photographs of them together grandmother looks like a porcelain doll. She nearly never smiled. I have only one photograph where she is smiling.
My mother used to keep the dolls on the wardrobe. Maybe that was for good, because I would have broken them all. When my grandmother passed on I asked my mother if I could have them. She agreed. Now the dolls are in my room. Occasionally I take one down when I’m making a dress for her. One totally looks like my grandmother. Sometimes I talk to her, like with my grandmother’s tomb, because she is buried far away, in the other city. From time to time my parents go to visit her. I go with them though I don’t like it that way. I want to be with my grandmother alone. Parents tidy the place; take off the pricks and weeds. Then they accuse me of not helping them. I don’t because I know my grandmother does not care if the tomb is tidy or not.
Grandmother’s name is Elsie. I like it. I would’ve liked if my parents had named me Elsie, but perhaps I was just expecting too much. My name is Maya; I like it to a degree, it’s not the worst name existing.
Maya wants to die; some would say I can’t do that because I’m already dead. Maybe that would be much better. I wonder what death looks like. You die and you fly… where to? Death can always accept you. It doesn’t divide you according to your age or mind. It accepts everyone. Living people don’t.
I’m one of those who don’t fit in. Outcast. Misfit. I don’t look like or behave to fit in. I don’t get drunk every Friday, I don’t get good marks at school, I often skive off lessons, but only because I don’t like learning; I am not trying to prove somehow I’m a rebel. Maybe the very opposite. I’m sensitive. Too sensitive. I cry often. In my pillow there is more salt than in the Dead Sea. At least I think so. Others think nothing of it. They think I call the spirits at night. It would be good… I would like to talk with my grandmother and perhaps a lot of other people. Sometimes I think they were too good to live. Now they are in the better place. I guess I’m idolizing my grandmother. When she died I was seven. Grandfather talks about her sometimes. I like to listen to him then. My mother doesn’t talk about her mother. She did not like her mother. She says grandmother had done a lot of bad things, but grandfather speaks nothing of if.
All people idolize the past. Hurtful things are often forgotten. People don’t want to remember things hurting them. So they remember only good things. And if they can’t forget them, they make them up. They make themselves think it seemed worse than it was. Then they believe the past was beautiful. Grandfather says my grandmother was beautiful. He misses her; maybe even more than I do, because he has known her for a lot of years. And I only have seven.
During those seven years my grandmother gave me thirteen dolls. I don’t know which doll I got on which occasion; mother didn’t pay attention to that. But I like to think that the one which looks a lot like my grandmother was either the last or the first one. Before her death I didn’t really take notice of the dolls. Grandfather gave me all grandmother’s photograph albums. My favorite photographs are the first ones. In those my grandmother is young and very pretty, often in dresses. After some of them I sew dresses for my dolls. Grandmother had a great taste for clothes. She liked corsets and skirts. After her death grandfather didn’t throw away any of her clothes. I took some of them for myself.
Then the photographs change. Grandmother’s hair at first goes gray, and then white; lips look thinner and thinner. Last photographs are colorful. She is often holding me in her arms. When my features start to shaping in my face, she is holding me no longer. Most often she is sitting near me, legs folded together, resting her hands on her knees.
Nobody took pictures of her in hospital.
When I was five, my grandmother got ill. At least I was told it was so. She was brought to hospital. Hospital is the place for ill people. In such hospitals it’s forbidden to visit patients often because sometimes they don’t understand someone is visiting them. But when she was at the hospital she was still sending me the dolls. I don’t know how she managed this. Maybe because she was healthy enough then.
My grandmother went insane before her death.
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