To Have And Behold

The first doll wore a Gingham patterned dress and blonde hair. Plush felt red shoes protected her from direct contact with a floor that would have replaced itself beneath her, taking her away forever. She had a name imprinted on a tag on her leg, though I do not remember it now. She was not the first doll I had ever seen in that place; she was the first doll I remember noticing.

There is more than one way to see the phenomena in our lives. At a base level, we see all, as our eyes do not discriminate which visible light they accept into the brain. On the next level up, our brain translates visual input into archetypal shapes it can recognize, so on some level we can recall structures in our memory, even ones we overlooked we still know to have been there. Above that, there are the things we look directly at still without noticing, which appear with more fine detail than the blur of stimuli below and even benefit from the brain's pattern-recognition instincts. I had seen many dolls by this point, I had recognized them as human-shaped dolls, I had seen many textures of "skin" and adornment. But then there is the "fourth level" of seeing (bearing in mind that these "levels" are perhaps closer to a spectrum than fixed segments of activity), where the mind has recognized something's shape and turned its will to "face" the phenomenum. This is when something is "noticed:" when "looking" is active. There are still levels above this one, involving a steady increase in how active the looking is, and in fact there are even ways to actively look at something without noticing it. How far had I destroyed my brain in active examination of my work, and my past, and the difficult line of demarcation between, for me to stand in those mansions in the end with diminished powers of noticing?

The Gingham doll sat alone on a chair above a collection of dolls sitting on the floor. She had eyes. Glass eyes placed in a felt body. From the way I entered the room, she looked at me. I hadn't seen a pair of eyes in a very long time, that even fake ones could intersect my soul. I felt......

I felt hollow, like this inanimate body could see through me. I felt imbalanced between a silent man noticing a doll, and a lifeless man being noticed by a doll, not that she was anything more than a doll, but that my diminished state made me less than inanimate, to the point that even a doll could see me. I guess I felt less real than the doll. I guess having a pair of eyes on me meant I could look at myself too.

I took the doll with me.