The Girl Who Grew Up In The TARDIS (Wattys2014)

Blue box girl

 The TARDIS kept me alive throughout those first vital hours of my life and we lived in a world where I wanted for nothing for I was simply happy to be alive. When I was a helpless baby, organic machinery part of the TARDIS nursed and carried me until I could walk and feed myself and somehow I thrived and grew into a child, learnt everything a human girl needed to know, the holograms and the films taught me about my planet and kept me entertained, inside your imagination you are never alone and then there was the actual TARDIS interface to talk or argue with…And there were endless rooms and places to discover inside the TARDIS. My favourite place was the library, so many books (some I weren’t allowed to read) with so many twisting spiral staircases and a glass top ceiling where I could watch the stars or the time vortex, then there was the swimming pool that stretched on for miles, a garden with actual mazes but the most important place of all was my bedroom (where every so often I could change the desktop theme but I always kept the attic which lay just above my room…) Of course I would be lying if I didn’t say I craved physical contact with another living being but I never doubted that the TARDIS loved me, she was my whole world. So much so that I had no knowledge that the Doctor existed until I turned eleven and the TARDIS deemed I was ready to see him, though here comes the strange part, I had been inside the TARDIS for eleven years but when I first saw the Doctor and his granddaughter, only a week had passed for the Doctor since I was picked up by the TARDIS. A week, it quite blew my mind, not only was there other people here and I wasn’t alone but my home planet was just beyond those doors but I knew I couldn’t leave the TARDIS, not yet. Though it was the most strangest and scariest thing to realise that barely no time at all had passed for the Doctor and outside those doors it was still November, 1963 but the TARDIS told me that things were about to change very soon for the Doctor and his new companions….

 I have never been outside but the TARDIS has shown me the blue police box which I live in, so I can imagine all the people that have walked through those doors would be pretty freaked out and astounded. And like the Doctor I wait for those words, it’s still funny even after all this time when they say it’s bigger on the inside, though no one quite realises the extent, the TARDIS is quite literally a world, I sometimes think like the universe it is expanding. I suppose you must be wondering how a normal human girl who is barely out of her teens could have spanned the centuries of a Time Lord’s life and how I managed to stay hidden all that time, well to quote the later incarnations of the Doctor, it’s all a bit, well, timey wimey. So this is no ordinary time machine and not even the Doctor who knows his time machine intimately has scratched the surface of what his “old girl” can do.

 I can’t explain it, I just understand it, within the TARDIS there are pockets of time; I am on a different time track to the Doctor and his companions, my own personal bubble. Over hundreds of years I have been at the Doctor’s side, though he does not know it and time has not passed at the same speed for me, I am barely into my twenties. I wish he could see me. Sometimes it’s like watching the Doctor and his friends through a window which only I can see out from but they cannot see into. The reality is that I can’t ever be in the same time and place as the Doctor, never to be on the same page, once I was years ahead of him, now I find myself days behind the Doctor’s personal timeline and some precious times it has been mere minutes. I have been tantalizingly close, it can feel like I’m just a heartbeat away from catching up with him but nevertheless I am watching events unfolding in the TARDIS that are already in the Doctor’s past, little more than an echo, a ghost even though sometimes I swear that during his later years the Doctor has caught glimpses of me…

 And not only have I seen the Doctor in his home, I have been privileged via the TARDIS’s telepathic abilities to see some of his adventures outside, though the TARDIS is very careful about what she shows me, aware that she could traumatize and terrify me. And I have been a silent witness to many of the good, amazing though sometimes stupid and bad things that this extraordinary, impossible man has done. And I have seen the monsters, some of the ones I will face one day, the Doctor and the monsters, I soon discovered that you cannot have one without the other

 Every time the Doctor has a new face I wonder when it will be my time. “When can the Doctor see me?” “Not yet.” The TARDIS tells me. If I’d known how long I would have to wait… Though I’m going on too far ahead of myself. You may think my life is cruel and inhuman but you have to understand, the TARDIS acted from the best of intentions, had she foreseen my future as the Doctor’s companion or by saving me had she created it? I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out the answer to that one. When I was a child, I was not sad or lonely because I didn’t know any different but now I’m twenty one I feel different about my existence, sometimes I think I don’t really exist at all and other days I feel I owe the TARDIS my existence.