Dalila

This used to be my toy car—the toy car I would take when visiting my grandmother so I wouldn’t have to play with her ceramic clowns, the toy car I would slide along the concrete ledge of the pier as I ignored the sailing boats floating along the lake in summer, the toy car that always joined me under the dinner table at Thanksgiving as we hid behind the white damask table cloth to shield our minds from sleepy conversations.
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I think I loved that car.
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What is it now? I don’t know. It always transformed before my eyes in that magical, child-hope filled imaginative process where toys become mystical beings capable of materializing one’s wildest, unconscious fantasies. My thought-creations regularly fragmented my gentle car’s appearance; sending it off into space, past time-warps into battles with legions of droids and six-armed goblins, and into the nebulous depths of a blue-green forest to fend off the fauns that tormented my dreams. My car absorbed and manifested every memory, every adventure, every mission…until I dropped it in my room and never returned to it again.
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There, it remained frozen, stuck in its current state for whose purpose I can no longer recall. I barely recognize it.
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The car is now a violent reminder of my abandonment. It slices the air, slices my past, slices my childhood— there is no comforting memory of youthful pleasures when I encounter it. All I see is its anger, its resentment, its threatening face. It is no longer mine. I left and didn’t return.