I've been blogging a bit on Xanga/LiveJournal lately, and even though I know no one really reads blog entries, I'll just chuck this up here in place of actually drawing something.

And all of a sudden it ended.

The room was filled with little toys, robots with large feet to balance upon, foam tigers with round clawless paws, cast iron toy trains with smiling faces on them, trucks with trailers that opened to reveal the vicious spring-loaded cannons on the inside. The boy wandered around the room, his ticklish fingers pressing every button they found, turning every figures arms, dragging every single wheeled toy along the soft, thinly carpeted floor. But the boy was, as all boys are, easily excitable, and each new toy his eyes fell upon left him with no interest in the current one. So he scoured the room, never understanding how the other children could play with thier lego blocks and their barbie dolls for so long, and treat them with so much care and passion. The boy sometimes felt lost, wanted to call to his mommy, and have her caress him in her loving embrace. But the boy always found a new toy to play with, a new toy to occupy his time.

The boy sometimes thought he was having fun, but he still felt empty, like the toys surrounding him were there to draw his eyes away from something else. Something better. This made the boy angry, and the boy began to vent his anger on the other children, stealing their food and messing up their toys. The other children began to dislike the boy for his uncontrollable tempers and his erratic behaviour, and they soon left him, taking with them their favourite toys. The boy just laughed at them as they left, telling them they were dumb for leaving him with all the toys, and so he continued to play. He felt lonely but he pretended not to, and occasionally the toys he was playing with would break and fall apart. The boy knew it wasn't his fault. He thought that the other children, or maybe the adults had left him with faulty toys, and one by one he began discarding them, or ignoring some of the toys altogether.

The room the boy resided in became larger and larger, and the colours on the wall, once bright and delightful, were slowly replaced by shades of grey, which were biased towards black. The window which once shone glowing ripples of sunlight upon the happy toys was clouded by the boy's own rage. The boy found toys that, although sometimes fun, hurt him and never really felt satisfying, never long-lasting. But for some reason, the boy couldn't stop playing with them. When he was playing with those toys, for a second, the room was no longer grey, the windows no longer dark, and so he went back to them, over and over again. He had nothing else to fill the void he had created.

One day, while the boy was sitting on the carpet in the pale light thay squeezed through the window, he saw something lying on the ground. It was a toy he used to play with, a toy he and his friends once used to dance to. It was a musical box. The outside of the musical box was coloured in oaken shades of brown, and embroidered with bold golden-yellow branches and tiny mint-green holly leaves. It was small enough for him to cradle with his hands, and yet big enough to that every detail on the finely carved exterior felt alive. At first, the boy contemplated throwing it away, into the amassed pile of forsaken toys he had built up in front of the door into the room. But the weavings of the box attracted him, willed him to wind up the dusty golden key, to open that door again. So he turned the key.


At first a little music, mellow and peaceful, trickled out of the tiny gap that had opened in the musical box. Then, much to the surprise of the boy, it burst open, showering spinkles of golden flakes and silver speckles into the air, then a beautiful melody of horns, flutes, harps, violins and cymbals erupted out of the box. The musical box itself was radiating, the golden branches and leafs suddenly appearing more full of vibrance. The boy, startled, rushed to the box to shut it, but when he looked inside he saw the sky, the sky which had long abandoned him, and along with it, the sun, and the clouds that were swirling around within the box, making the sunlight shining out shift and dance on the ceilings and walls of the room, flashing shapes of happy families laughing around dinner tables, young men and women holding hands in meadows of tranquility. The boy felt excitement rising in him, the feelings of joy and bliss flooded his soul. The cold stone coating of his heart, developed over days of desolation, slowly began to dissolve.

He had never felt so perfect in his life.