everything platonic ✓

chapter 3

Dollhouse

The door creaks open, and I step into the dim, cluttered hallway of our house, each corner stuffed with old memories, dust, and secrets buried under years of disuse. It feels like walking into a forgotten attic, the weight of expectations and ghosts of conversations hanging in the air. My mother’s voice drifts from the kitchen, sharp and brittle, like a broken vase being pieced together out of habit more than hope.

She doesn’t look at me as I walk in, just keeps her hands busy with the dishes, her gaze fixed somewhere just past my shoulder. It’s as if I’m a shadow in the room, something less than real, a presence that neither comforts nor disrupts. Her silence gnaws at me, a reminder of all the things we never say, all the things we’re too afraid or too proud to admit.

In the living room, my brother sits hunched over a video game, the light from the screen casting eerie shadows across his face. He’s too absorbed to notice me, too wrapped up in his own little world, the one he’s built to keep everything out, to keep us at arm's length. He’s older now, but still carries that same guarded look he had when we were kids, the look of someone who learned too early that love is a weapon just as often as it’s a shield.

I move past him, barely a whisper, as if I could slip through the cracks of this house and vanish without anyone noticing. I reach my room and close the door behind me, feeling the familiar thud of isolation settle in, a comforting weight that presses down on me, grounding me in the hollow silence that fills the space between these walls.

Rosie once called my family a dollhouse. "Everyone in their little rooms, going through the motions," she said, her eyes distant, her voice edged with something I couldn’t quite place – sadness, maybe, or understanding. She looked at me then, really looked at me, with a gaze that felt like peeling back layers I didn’t know I had. “It’s like you’re all playing parts, but no one’s really there.”

I hated her for saying it, for seeing what I couldn’t bear to admit. But she was right. We were like dolls, bound by invisible strings, moving in the same tired patterns, unable to break free from the roles we’d been given. My mother, the martyr, forever sacrificing herself on the altar of motherhood, her love a weapon she wielded with surgical precision. My brother, the silent witness, watching from the shadows, his silence a fortress he’d built to keep us all out.

And me. The obedient daughter, the quiet one, the one who never spoke her mind, who kept her thoughts locked up tight, afraid of what might happen if I let them spill out. The one who learned to survive by keeping her head down, by playing the part that was expected of her, even as it hollowed her out from the inside.

But Rosie saw through it all, saw the cracks in the façade, the fractures hidden beneath the surface. She saw the fear, the shame, the self-loathing I kept buried deep, too afraid to confront it, too afraid to let anyone else see it. She saw me, really saw me, in a way no one else ever had. And for a moment, I felt like I could breathe, like I could be something more than the hollow shell I’d become.

But that feeling never lasted. It was always fleeting, slipping through my fingers like sand, leaving me with nothing but the bitter taste of regret and the ache of something I couldn’t name. And every time I looked at her, I felt that ache deepen, a gnawing emptiness that threatened to consume me, to pull me under.

I sit on the edge of my bed, the weight of everything pressing down on me, heavy and suffocating. I can feel the sharp edge of the old scars on my wrist, a reminder of the nights I spent staring into the darkness, teetering on the edge of oblivion. The nights I wanted to disappear, to erase myself from the world, to escape the weight of my own existence.

But I’m still here. Still trapped in this dollhouse, playing the same tired role, going through the motions, even as the cracks widen, threatening to swallow me whole.

I close my eyes, and Rosie’s face drifts into my mind, soft and blurred around the edges, like an old photograph. I can still hear her voice, bright and clear, cutting through the silence, pulling me back from the edge. She was the only one who ever made me feel like I mattered, like I was more than just a shadow, a ghost haunting the halls of my own life.

But even she couldn’t save me from myself.