The Untouchable Shelf

There were days that I didn't believe in it. Where I questioned if the shelf really held any magical properties or if that was just something my parents told me to keep me from messing with it.

It was the hat. Small, made out of tin foil, the perfect size for one of my dolls during a tea party I was having that day. I knew that she'd be the flashiest, most popular girl in the bunch with that tin foil hat on. But it was on the shelf.

Throughout my short life at that point - I was only about seven at the time - I'd seen a variety of items come and go on the shelf, but I almost never knew what happened to them. One of the few items I knew that stuck around were the lights that I had stuck to my ceiling, like the glow in the dark stars that some of my friends had, except that mine were more than just stickers. They changed colors, moved around the ceiling into clumps if I asked nicely, turned out the light if I was being a brat. If I brought friends over for a sleepover, the lights would stay in place, not change color, none of their usual fanciful fun.

There was another time where I was playing in the living room where the shelf was and I accidentally bumped it, causing some old vase to fall. As it crashed to the ground, there was a roar that filled my ears. Had I ever been, I would've known it was the ocean. There was sand that spilled out across the hardwood floor, and once I recovered from the roaring noise, I quickly ran to my mother, who only briefly chastised me for my carelessness. I offered to help her clean up, but she shooed me away, telling me that even though it fell off the shelf, I wasn't allowed to touch it.

I wondered what the tin foil hat might do to me while I stood in front of the shelf. My parents were going to be out for a few hours, I could always just put the hat back on the shelf before they got home and they wouldn't ever even know that I'd touched it. I made sure I memorized where the hat belonged before I reached for it.

The moment I touched the folds of silvery material, I knew I did something wrong. There was the smell of something burning in the air, the taste of something metal in my mouth, and my vision went completely dark before it came back fuzzier than before. I could see again and I was no longer holding the hat. It was still sitting exactly on the shelf where it had been before I touched it. I tried to touch it again, hoping that might put things back the way they belonged, but my hand passed through the hat as though it wasn't real. I tried to touch other things on the shelf, hoping any of them might be able to fix whatever was wrong with me, when I realized it wasn't the hat that wasn't real.

It was me that wasn't real.

When my parents came home, they didn't call out my name, didn't acknowledge that I should have been there. I went upstairs to my room and found that instead it had a desk and some other shelves lining the walls. I looked around the house for things that were mine that should have been there, but the house was different, it had changed, it was no longer mine. I didn't live there and it didn't look like I ever had. My parents weren't parents at all.

I don't get hungry at least, so I don't have to worry about that. Cops can't see me so it doesn't matter whether or not I sleep on a park bench or even in the middle of the sidewalk, although I don't enjoy it when people walk through me. Occasionally I'll walk past a dog and it'll start barking, so I'll stop and pet it for a moment, and those are the only moments when I remember those days when I was little, when I was tangible, when I was real. Maybe someday I'll die, when I'm old and have lived out my non-life. Maybe I'll never die, be a ghost forever.

At least I can still pet dogs.