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A Toy to Remember
A toy to remember.
Twenty-four seven I see a cold and sterile white roof in front of me, I sit patiently watching the same hollow television shows day after day. I’ve been here for as long as I can remember. So long in fact that the room even comes close to feeling like home sometimes, but there’s just something about it. It oozes of sterility, of loneliness, it oozes of the feeling of time slowing down. It’s weird, even though my mother stays on the sofa next to me almost all day and night I can’t help but feel some sort of loneliness creeping into me. I lie on my so-called bed, in a vacant-pensive mood, trying to think of the last time I went out into the world. A world where white coats and blue uniforms are not the only thing people wear. A world where people are not trying to shove medicine on to your face every five minutes, or trying to put needles in your arm. A place where water doesn’t taste like cleansed puke. A knock on the door is all it takes to take me out of my pensive state of mind. My grandparents come into the room, just a few days after their last visit. There’s a bag in their hands, in it something that would change my state of mind for the rest of my hospital stay. A Mario Brothers pair of toys, a Mario Mario and a Luigi Mario, as they are called in that godawful movie adaptation of the nineties. I have always been my grandmother’s spoiled grandson, which is why she visits often, and always buys me things to try and cheer me up. But nothing ever got as much of my attention as this Mario toy has. It has bright red paint on it, a huge contrast to the whiteness of the room. It comes with a go-kart of the same color, with which I can make him do all sorts of crazy maneuvers around the room. It has become my partner in crime, with me whenever I cause mischief in the hospital. My obsession with the Mario franchise started the day she brought me that toy, and it has never let go of me. Years go by, and my collection of Mario figures and toys grows larger by the minute. My original Mario toy becomes a casualty to the passage of time and the increasing toy count, it’s lost somewhere in the limbo that is my closet. The day I moved out of my house I found it, all dirty. Some of its bright red paint had come off, and it was missing one of its hands. Nowadays even though it’s not the prettiest toy in my collection, it sits in the middle of every other Mario I’ve collected over the years, reminding me of the fun times I had with it, and the support my grandmother gave me while I was stranded in the hospital.
