Looking For Cinderella (Special post, November 16, 2023)

 Listen to audio

November 16th, 2023

I left the hardware store earlier this year; and after looking hard this time for something that would put my education and experience to good use, and finding nothing, I settled on a part-time job at another store. At least this one pays a bit better. Since I began this second job in retail, I've been prioritizing getting to work on time and animal care. I've been making a Saints & Haints video every few days, so they'll be ready to post on a regular basis, and so that eventually I'll be able to spend most of my free time on my next project, Graven Images.

Not too long ago, A and I designed four children for ourselves, using FaceApp, a photo editing application which has a feature that combines faces. We made two sons and two daughters. They turned out gorgeous. We are, of course, dreaming of our future together, which will begin as soon as I take my last breath, and we are transported to Jesus' Kingdom, where we will learn to design worlds of our own. We have decided that four children will be enough to start out with. We want them to have playmates, but we don't want too many at once, because we want to give them lots of love and attention. When they grow up, if they decide to move on and create their own homes elsewhere, we can have more children. We want to have some little ones always. Eventually there will be a race of teal-eyed people, but that can take as long as it needs to. Four is enough to begin with. We have imagined the two boys being older than the two girls.


Working at the store has initiated some fantasies about things to come. For instance, I walk through the toy department and look longingly at the play food items and think,
"I want to play restaurant with our girls! We can send our orders back, you know, just to teach them what life was like on this planet.
'That's something your Mom had to put up with when she worked as a waitress,' we can tell them. Can't you just see the flabbergasted looks on their little faces?"

"But we'll only send the orders back sometimes, and then they'll get a kiss and a hug and... anything else they want. We don't want to make them work for a living; only to show them what it was like here," A replies.

We dream of teaching them about the jobs we had, and hardships we endured, just so they'll understand our stories better. We want them to know what we went through, and what we escaped from. We imagine games, centered around Earth culture, to play with them, like "Hair Dresser."
I imagine A with a purple perm and chuckle to myself.
"You'd better not be laughing at our daughters' designs," he comments, "I might get a new do and have to wear it for a century
or two."
We're Christmas shopping in our minds; laying gifts away for the future.
It's something we never got to do together on this planet, in this existence, but we will.

I asked A one day what he liked to play as a child. He replied,
"That is not that bad of a question to ask this husband-to-be. I liked to play doctor."
I said,
"Okay, that's good! We can play that with them too, because they won't know what illnesses or injuries are. We can pretend to be hurt or sick, and let them bandage us up."

One day, after we'd been discussing these things, A randomly commented,
"Both of them at the same time... please..."
Understanding that he meant our girls, I replied,
"What? Twins? Our girls have to be twins now?"
He said,
"Yes... because I can't wait to get our hair fixed and send our food back."
I asked,
"What about the boys? Aren't they supposed to be older?"
After a moment's pause, he replied,
"It seems that there's an immediate need for all of them."


I was recently looking for a doll I had when I was a child. It is a Cinderella doll that Aunt Nell hand-sewed for me. She's two dolls in one... if you turn her upside down, and flip her skirts inside out, she becomes a different doll. She's the rich girl on one side, and the poor girl on the other side. It meant a lot to me because I love Aunt Nell dearly; and recently I've been pondering how symbolic that priceless gift actually was. I knew it had to be somewhere at my parents' house, but, alas, my mother is a pack rat. I rummaged through one of her storage closets the other day, but to no avail.
"It's here somewhere," I thought.
It wasn't a completely fruitless effort, though. I did find my "Mary and Laura Ingalls" dolls.
Laura was handmade by Aunt Nell, to be a counterpart to a store bought doll whom I'd already named Mary, after the oldest daughter on Little House on the Prairie. Since I'd insisted that the store bought doll was Mary, and didn't need replacement, Aunt Nell had sewn a western-style dress and apron for Mary, so that at least she and Laura would match.

Last night, I awoke from the midst of a dream. In the dream, I had found a clown puppet that I used to play with as a child. It belonged to my father when he was little. It had a rubber head and a cloth body with a brown paisley pattern. There was an opening in the back where one could insert their hand and operate his head and arms. I had forgotten about him, but I saw him clearly; even the pattern on the fabric of his body. I also saw another doll that I had as a baby. She wore an apron of many layers, and on the layers, a story was written, and one could flip through them like the pages of a book. I had thought of her briefly while I was excavating my mother's closet, but I had completely forgotten the existence of the clown puppet.

I woke up thinking,
"Oh! I forgot about him!"
To which A replied,
"There's another box of your toys somewhere. Keep digging."
I started to think,
"And Cinderella's probably in that box..."
Before I had even completed that thought, however, A was saying,
"Yessss...."
Once again, I began to form a thought, something like,
"You mean you looked back through my childhood memories... to find Cinderella?"
But again, before I'd even finished the thought, A was saying,
"You bet your ass I looked into that... for my children's mother."

A bit later, he asked me,
"Do you mean what you said? That you will give me that honor, of presenting me with beautiful twin daughters to play Hair Salon and Restaurant with?"
I smiled and said,
"Yes... with all my heart."
He responded,
"Then I will never let anything come between us."