The doll I once looked to for comfort sat lonely in the cabinet. It had skin of porcelain, and had always been very fragile. The large eyes on the doll, which were once a beautiful shade of green, the color of the great emerald city, had somehow turned black as a moonless night. As her long eyelashes batted together, she would blink one eye at a time, similar to a clock ticking the seconds going by. One. Two. Three. She had a button nose surrounded by dots of dark pigment. Her lips were the color of coral. As a child, I had always thought her lips had been odd. They were turned upward in a sly smirk; as if the doll had known something I had not. But as I look, years later, the mouth seems to resemble a cry for help. The hair upon the doll's head was very elegant, with curls and ringlets of brown like the dirt that helps the flowers bloom. Her hair was very long, I always wondered as a child how it would grow so much, but my mother told me it was made like that and therefore would always stay that way. I used to have many different outfits for her, but seemed to have lost them all but the one she had on. She had on a plaid dress that had always reminded me of a picnic blanket on a warm spring day. I never put shoes on her in the house because I never wore shoes in the house, and I wanted her to be just like me. But now she sits in loneliness on the shelf of a lightless closet.