A very long time ago, upwards of perhaps 35 years, I recall being in elementary school and taking part in these holiday caroling things where my entire class would just… go places and sing Christmas carols. I have vague memories of doing these recitals at the school district’s local auditorium and in hindsight I cannot fathom anyone other than teachers, faculty, and parents possibly being there. None of us could sing; we didn’t have any training or anything, we weren’t a choir class. We were literally just an assortment of grade schoolers; standing in the middle of a crowd of bleating children all on different keys I don’t remember the performances sounding very pleasing, I’d imagine if you were out in the audience where this outsider music was being projected toward it probably sounded much worse. But it was a bunch of kids experiencing “the magic of Christmas” or whatever, so everyone put on a fake smile and felt good about it.
Sometimes our school would take this show on the road and we’d go to other local places where people gathered and sing the same songs. One year I remember we were taken to a nursing home and performed all our “greatest hits” to a crowd of people who, now that I think about it, were probably all dead by the time I reached middle school. My mother was the second-youngest child in her family so her parents (my grandparents) were already pretty old, however I was also the first child in my immediate family so that offset things just a little bit and unlike my siblings I actually did get to know my grandparents and form meaningful memories of them (further reading: Christmas, 1998). All of this is to say that when I was very young I acknowledged that my grandparents were “old”, but the people in this assisted living facility were beyond the definition of that.
I don’t think I really had the ability to grasp in any real way the gravity of the environment that I was in. I just saw a bunch of people who were very clearly not well and no two of them shared the same apparent issue. It was frightening in a way that to this day I’m not sure I can put into words. Being six(ish) years old and confronted with someone fourteen times older than you who looks like they are knocking on death’s door and you don’t have the lived experience or humility to understand what is happening is harrowing. At that point in time there was a fair chance that some of the men in that room would’ve been World War II veterans, which is mind-boggling to consider.
I have forgotten the names and faces of everyone who was brought into the communal space that day save for one of them, a lithe elderly woman confined to a wheelchair who unlike everyone else around her seemed to just be overjoyed at the occasion. There was never a moment where she was not all smiles. She was someone’s mother, and probably a grandmother too. Perhaps all of those implied grandkids were adults now and this was kind of her way of recapturing some memories that meant something to her. Or, if I wanted to be cynical with the knowledge I’ve gained in the near four decades it’s been, maybe she was hopped up on morphine and thought we were the Jackson 5. I really don’t and will never know but the fact of the matter is the image of this woman has stayed in my mind for my entire life.
She was holding a small teddy bear in her lap that she would occasionally fidget and play with. She always had it on her and while we were singing she’d occasionally make him dance around. Her actions didn’t make me feel uneasy or anything, I’d say with my immature mind I was more amused than anything, but I remember telling my parents about it after the recital was over. My mother, being the magnanimously-hearted person she was definitely known to be, didn’t lend any sort of empathetic consideration to my pondering and brushed it off with the simple explanation that maybe she was demented. I was too young to know what “Alzheimer’s” was but I didn’t have long to dwell on the concept because almost immediately my mom chimed in again with another equally brutal suggestion: she was lonely.
But it wasn’t phrased that way. No, my mother elected to lean into her hypothesis a bit further and went on to explain that this mystery woman probably had that bear because nobody ever came to visit her and that stuffed animal was her only friend.
That’s kind of a fucked up thing to drop on the developing mind of someone who’s still young enough to think that Santa Claus is real, that this person – this literal human being who probably has a family – can just be cast aside like discarded garbage to be forgotten about in a town that the rest of that family probably still lives in. There’s actually a neologism for this exact sort of unintentionally scarring: kinderterror. No one realizes it as it happens, but eventually you wake up one day and realize something seemingly inconsequential turned out to be a brain parasite. I didn’t know it at the time, but part of me grew up that day against its will.
The entire rest of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood came and went. Time ensured that the majority of these mundane experiences would deteriorate in my thoughts and like a well-loved VHS tape be overwritten with other ultimately meaningless crap that in a given moment I told myself was “very important”. There are a litany of posts on this website that talk about getting through things in my life, but one of the things I don’t think I ever really talked about was my fondness for stuffed animals. Now, I should elaborate that this is not a “fondness” in a weird sexual sense; in actuality I automatically judge people who are into plushophilia quite negatively. I didn’t bring it up in the post I wrote about the incident but the guy who kind of took advantage of an awkward predicament and coerced me into sleeping with him was really into that (further reading: Lurking in the Shadows). As a result it elicits a very visceral response from me because I see that kind of interest as a perversion of childhood innocence. I later found out that same person also had a knack for artwork of characters who did not appear to be of age and his outward cope was that they were just “chibi” style. Those things are inseparable in my mind now.
So no, none of the stuffed animals I own have a “strategically placed hole” in them. They’re large, as big as I am, and it’s purely a platonic thing. I’d always had an assortment of stuffed toys when I was younger just because that was something most kids had. Throughout the 90’s I had a handful of Sonic the Hedgehog dolls and around the middle of the decade I picked up a few Pokemon ones too. Christian Weston Chandler was not the only emotionally wayward child whose parents let him wander around inside Service Merchandise with his Caltoy Sonic plush. And, like that famous convicted criminal, I too would make up stories in my head of all the cool adventures Sonic and I would go on. I grew out of that of course, but the familiarity of stuffed animals being in my life was something that wound up not going anywhere.
I’ve led a solitary life for the majority of my adult years. That’s mostly a choice on my behalf, but in my younger years I stepped up to the plate and took several swings at relationships but didn’t have the foresight to know that searching for meaningful companionship in the furry fandom is a pretty stupid thing to do. A lot of the company I had throughout my college years and beyond came in the form of my large stuffed animals because they were just enjoyable to hang onto at night when I’d otherwise just be in bed alone. I mentioned in a previous journal that I have a large killer whale, but I also have a dolphin and two alligators. My personal favorite however is a genuine late 90’s era Spyro the Dragon that’s three feet tall and was only given out as a carnival prize; they are exceedingly rare, and since it was made to be cheap theme park tat he was originally stuffed with shredded styrofoam so not only did I pony up a couple hundred dollars to get him I also spent another hundo on the process and materials to stuff him with something a little less gross.
There came a certain point where a realization crept into the back of my mind; the reason why I had all of these stuffed toys that I enjoyed spending time with. Watching a movie on the couch. Playing a video game. Reading old comic books. I always had my plushie in tow in the privacy of my home because otherwise I’d just be wasting time on my own, by myself. There wasn’t anyone here. No spouse, no loved ones. No relatives or friends. I was doing it… because I was lonely.
The memory of that old woman and her teddy bear snuck up on me, it cut to the front of the line in my train of thought and was the only thing I could focus on. How she got to where she was. I understood it now. It’s not an overnight “here one day gone the next” matter. That woman’s family probably did visit her for the first little while she was there but those visits became further and further spread apart until one day they just stopped. There was no fanfare, no goodbye. Just the unconscious acknowledgment of “I can’t do this anymore” and an equally unconscious decision to just stop showing up. All the people in my personal life, the people I grew up with and knew, they too went on with their lives. Or they died. The fact of the matter is I woke up to the realization that this was my new reality.
Of course, interpersonal relationships are a two-way street. A friendship or what-have-you doesn’t arbitrarily die; it’s an unintended effect of both parties quietly making a choice without realizing it. I’m bad at keeping in touch with people day to day, but I am the type of person to at least call or text someone on their birthdays or Christmas. Sometimes that’s not enough though and I found myself drifting apart from others regardless. All the friends I had were online and while it’s kind of a disservice to say something like this that’s not exactly the same thing as being friends with someone in the physical world. They almost “don’t exist” in a weird way because your only interactions with them for the most part are with a computer. It’s not the same as a friendship with someone that you can invite over to have a beer and watch a badly dubbed karate film or a group of friends who get together to play board games a couple of times a month.
As soon as I became aware of this I obviously wanted to do something to fix it but in doing so I discovered that once friendships wane it’s often difficult to reconnect with people. A lot of the friends I had when I was younger are not the same person today and I mean that in a negative manner. Nobody is the same person they were 25 years ago of course, but sometimes the change is so radical that spending time with someone becomes unpalatable. Everyone has their battles, but maladaptive coping mechanisms really can completely ruin the personability of even a former childhood best friend. Becoming aware of the slow dissolution of old friendships was a hard pill to swallow, but realizing that the trajectory of their lives has taken them down a road incompatible with yours was even harder.
There’s a uniquely pitiable aspect to being my age and having so little going on in your personal life that your primary company is a stuffed dragon and an orca, but I suppose that’s just how things unfold sometimes. Every day is an opportunity to change that, and sometimes I work up the nerve to actually try and make a difference where it counts, but the allure of the comforting embrace of an old friend is hard to turn a cold shoulder to. Even if they never talk, even if they cannot love you back, it’s still soothing to at least have someone – or rather something – to spend time with.
I most likely have no other place to mention this on this journal, but there was once a person in the furry fandom who struck me as a particularly sad case. Though his name is forever seared into my memory, for the sake of his privacy I won’t mention it. He was a very lonesome person, known for a very large stuffed alligator that he pal’ed around with. All of the commissions he bought were clean and they were of his fursona hugging or playing with it. They were all scenes and slices from his personal life; that stuffed animal was his anchor. One day he posted an erratic journal to FurAffinity stating that he’d made the difficult decision to part with it. He explained in great detail the anguish he felt packing this doll into a garbage bag… and just throwing it away. And then, a few days later, he vanished. He deleted all of his submissions, all of his art that celebrated this bond he had with this fictional being, and then deleted his profiles on what few sites he participated on.
He didn’t donate it, he just discarded it. It was time to move on. I could not fathom doing that to the alligator that I’ve had for 20 years. The thought of her rotting in a landfill breaks my heart in a way that only literal death can compare to. I take her everywhere. She literally gets a dedicated piece of luggage whenever I travel. She was there on the evening that I was assaulted; she came with me on that trip and I’m glad I chose to bring her because dare I say that turned out to be the only way I kept my composure. Varka has met her, literally; she traveled with me to Phoenix when I visited him. She’s been to Washington state when I spent New Year’s with some online friends that, for the weekend, became real-life ones. She’s been to California, to Ohio, to Florida, to Nevada, and to North Carolina.
Perhaps in that regard the person I mentioned was stronger than me. I haven’t seen nor heard from him in over 15 years – no one has – but I think of him often. I hope he feels more alive than ever. Wherever he is, wherever his life led him once he made his decision, I hope he is well. I hope someday I can find that kind of peace.
Until next time.
