#source: the doll my dad gave me as a child whose outer wooden piece eventually cracked and fell apart

[septembersghost]

just to say that whenever Bobbo talks about Gene having Jimmy and Saul and all the other people bottled up inside him (on commentaries) I think of you calling Jimmy a matryoshka doll and laugh-cry a little

jimmy my beloved little nesting doll, there are simply so many parts of him contained within the others, stacked together and together and compressing the real, vulnerable heart inside.

and here's the thing - the outermost doll is always the thinnest and most fragile, even though it's the biggest. it large, but it's easy to crack apart. the innermost doll may be the smallest and most compact, but it's the densest and strongest. you can't just break it, it's resilient and it stands on its own, it doesn't come apart, it doesn't have a seam to split it in half. even after everything, the mistakes and the hurts (caused and experienced), the layers of repression and personas, the innermost doll is still jimmy, the human person. he's still in there, under the artifice. cradled closely enough, he still emerges.