Ranjeeta Singh

The last picture taken of Singh (on the right) and their house, the night before the fire.

There was a fateful day in my pre-teen years, hanging in a limbo between adolescence and pure, innocent youth – the day I first locked eyes with my mother’s porcelain doll. I was smitten. She was beautiful. She was untouchable, and I wanted her.

I begged my mother with all my might to allow me to have her, even if only for just a second to borrow her, take her out of the box, to press my stubby fingers into the plush velvet of her luxurious fur coat or the smooth, cool china of her dimples.

“No.”

“Why not? I just want to take her out of her box.”

“Exactly. No.” She had completely shut me down before I could even fight for it.  

“Arha, you’re seven. She’ll break.” Of course, she had a point. 

So that was that. My mother’s wedding gift from twenty-something years ago from another “what’s-her-face” relative could not be mine to keep. I was heartbroken. I pushed onwards, however, with the promise of my mother that one day, when I was old enough – responsible enough – I could finally have her.

And somewhere, after years and years of yearning, I finally abandoned her memory, forever trapped behind the great, looming expanse of my parents’ room, the door at the end of the hall.

And again, there was a fateful day in February of 2021 where I hung in a limbo between reclusion and pure, innocent fear. Where I locked eyes once more – this time with my home. I was awestruck. It was beautiful. It was terrible. And I wanted nothing more than to undo all of time.

Nothing more than to feel the matted carpet flooring of my bedroom, nearly as old as I was, itch against my skin after an evening run through Tanglewood. Or tuck myself between the Hello Kitty sheets that I had married to the memory of first grade, my very own set, one of my favorite birthday presents from my parents. When time still moved slowly. 

Scanning over the rubble after the accident, I was faced with the remains of my room. The years of asylum it provided me from my own life felt caught in my throat, suffocating me – it was as if I were still there, trapped in the fire, unable to breathe. If I didn’t say anything, no one else would ever be able to tell that it had happened. No one but me. The impermanence of it all struck me. 

Years later, in the present day, that land remains a flat plain. The wreckage of my trauma no longer scars the perfect landscape of the neighborhood. It is nothing again. An empty lot, haunted by its own history – a history that was so easily erased. 

No longer is there any trace of the days of my childhood spent giggling through sprinklers, fountains, blow-up pools and waterslides in our small, sweet courtyard; the hours and hours my brother had put into his garden. The trees of our front yard had only just borne the fruit of his labor when the whole state froze over. I found I would never know the taste of my brother’s love-cultivated blood oranges.

I thought of the memories of my house – no, my home – and how they all collapsed, like dominoes, into the same dreadful attachment to my room, my lovely room, one I’d spent years making my own. I had spent my whole life making it my own. 

It had been my best friend through my empty childhood, destitute of companionship. My shoulder to cry on when all hope was lost. I was a sad, lonely child. It had been my therapist, my vault, home to all my treasures. And yet, so suddenly, it was no more.

I couldn’t dislodge the looming regret of allowing this to happen the way I did, allowing it to happen when I did, allowing it to happen at all. And I especially couldn’t dislodge the regret of having lost my mother’s beautiful, sweet porcelain doll, her wedding gift, not even days after I had finally been granted my wish, to keep her forever. 

Years of anticipation and slow-burn desire had all warped into an odd shade of resentment.

The night before, I had felt her green glass-bead eyes burning into my periphery. I desperately regretted my childhood infatuation with her – I wanted nothing more than to abandon her at the foot of my mother’s door that very second. She was watching me and I knew it. I wasn’t the only one unable to sleep that night and I knew it. She was wide awake.

It was a stark irony, almost. To have waited and wanted for so long, only to receive and desert. And this irony only seemed to be furthered by the realization that the very second I had finally had her – the one thing I so desired all these years of my life, this beautiful, delicate picture of innocence – she had been snatched horribly from my grasp.

It was only in that moment that I realized just how cruel a mistress fate could be.

The power had gone out that night, and my insomnia had been especially rude, exposing me to my worst fear, the dark, all alone in the freezing cold. Maybe, now that I think of it, it was a message. To get used to the dark. To familiarize myself with it, as now, the thought of ever resorting to a candle would forever weigh on me like a death wish.

Sometimes I think of how helpless I was in the eye of the storm, where the world went quiet, where it was just me and the four walls of my childhood, where the raging fire hung vengefully above me. My mother had screamed for water, and in my hands I had been holding a mug, conveniently. In my blatant confusion, I rushed to the filtered jug water we all drank from – why I did so I can’t seem to recognize. To pour the fire a drink I suppose.

Yet when I was faced with the sheer magnitude of the flames, I remember dropping my hand to my side and allowing my lovingly gathered water to dribble out onto the floor. It had washed over me in that brief moment, that split-second:

“Nothing matters anymore. It’s a lost cause.” 

And my poor home? She was too far gone to be saved.

In the literal heat of that moment, the intricate pieces of my childhood, the history I had so laboriously woven together, every item I had ever owned – my whole life, quite frankly, had been erased off the surface of the planet. Never before had I been confronted so blatantly with my own insignificance. Never before was I faced with the true transience of the material goods I allowed to weigh so heavily on my sense of personal identity.

It has been a lesson in the works for me, these last four years. To feel emotion, experience things, but never in excess. To learn how to love but never allow it to stretch to attachment. This fear of commitment isn’t limited to relationships – I cannot journal my thoughts, put ink on paper, create art, for fear of experiencing that loss again. It is an unfortunate warning, but it has at the very least scared me out of my naivety, my habitual blind idealism. My unwavering belief that it will all work out. 

In the same breath, however, it has inspired me. It has given me purpose, pushed me to create, to make myself known. With the fear of impermanence follows that of mortality, how easily my existence could be erased if the man upstairs so willed it to be. I have been forced back to reality yet shot to the stars. I ask myself every day, if I were to cease to exist tomorrow, what would I have to show for it all? What would remain of my efforts?

I have been gifted a motive to make a difference. I have been granted the drive to enact change. I may be insignificant, but that is only if I allow myself to be so.

So, all in all, in saying so, dear reader, I ask you this – if you ceased to exist tomorrow, what would you have to show for your life?