Diana
Ghost of Doll
1854, Germany
There are times when our little one is not our little one. I sense this and it troubles me. She is like one who is not there, a shell of a being. A ghost.
Sometimes, very late at night, I hear her when she thinks we do not hear her, walking to the large piano room.
As the library is for me, the piano room is for her, in this large taken house. I follow her small form, and she wanders away to the piano bench, sitting there finally in her long white night dress.
She does not touch the piano, but rather I see she longs for something else. Some mysterious thing which we can not begin to know or guess.
What is this thing in her heart which beats independent of her own beat? There is yet something there, it is clear. Yet we shall never know.
As mysterious as we both are, she is the most secretive of all three of us in our shared company. She never says a word of her past, nor of what she experiences nightly. Though she may come home covered in blood, or perhaps in head to foot of mud, she says not a word and wanders back upstairs to sleep off whatever she has seen. Such horrors or such joys? We can not know, though we wish to. Yet she will never open up to us.
As it is now. She has walked to the piano room as if a doll shell, and sits there on the bench, just staring at the old keys. There is a thing in her eyes which says she may even be afraid to touch those ivory whites.
It is odd to me, though I do not ever say, how when we traveled together, she had disappeared for many a year and then came back to me somehow knowing how to play those keys as if expert. As if she loved the piano, as if it were a person, a much beloved person. Especially if the piano were black. Why this color and not any other? What is so special about this color? And yet there is something frightening in her love. Her intense devotion.
She visits the piano as if visiting a grave.
It is eerie, and sends shivers up my spine.
As it is now, as I watch from the door to her, over her, protecting her small form in this little gesture. As all sleep and all are quiet, I will stand here for however long she needs to be with her beloved, for there is not just one devoted love in this lonely room.
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