Today I’m just a dolphin, a plastic dolphin that someone grabs and fights over, makes swim and wallow in a bathtub. Half the time I lie there sticky and drying like a moldy bottle, and I like to splash and sway, and I am desirable only because someone else desires me, and I’m small because someone else uses me as their toy, and I’m a fish because someone incorrectly calls me a fish, and I fight with the other toys because I am made to fight. I’m just a dolphin, lost in a dry, dark bathtub world beneath a sky of tile, and I’m loved only when someone chooses me to love.
I can’t help empathizing with the toys. Like them, we all have our inert moments.
Months pass, and one day I ask Faye if she wants to have a bubble bath.
“No,” she says, “because then I won’t see the dolphins.”
They exist (we exist) when someone desires them to be there (or desires us to be there)…