The Troll

A recollection of a lost treasured toy that came to me after attending Vibecamp 3

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Epistemic Status: True events

As I write this, I'm laying in bed in the AirBnB a couple well-off friends have rented as our place in Philly on our way back from Vibecamp. I'm processing lots of intense feelings related to the three-day event held in the woods of Philadelphia, based on Burning Man and other pop-up city projects. Last night, the realization hit me like a weight lifted off my chest after having neglected this blog and its space as my confessional for months now, with words around my experience choking in my throat as I waited and waited for outcomes that stopped feeling within my control a long time ago: I could finally write again. Now that the event was over, I could feel the Narrativium (a word coined by a beautiful young pale trans woman I'd met there named Astrix) flowing again, the felt sense of life crafting itself as a story desiring to be lived.

This is the sweet little orange-haired troll doll I adopted ~2019 while I was working in homecare and had barely begun experimenting with witchcraft. An elderly couple I was contracted with wanted to get rid of some of their stuff. This doll had been salvaged from a house that had burned down; his beady little dark red eyes were clearly haunted and he smelled of smoke.

I did my best to give him a bath but the smoke smell was replaced by his underlying weird, strong rubbery scent. He wasn't really pleasant to hold or cuddle with because he smelled so strange. Rubbery and vaguely musky.

He horrified several of my friends who didn't understand what I saw in an ugly little doll that probably belonged in the trash, but it didn't matter. He needed me, so I was there.

Eventually I lost him in one of the moves. I expect he's still out there somewhere, in the rainbow field where trolls go when they slip through the cracks between our worlds.