You Can Tell By The Stuffed Toys (an essay)

An army of stuffed animals for has practically surrounded me as long as I have been on this earth, from receiving a truckload of soft toys as an infant to collecting a menagerie of bean bag organisms around my elementary school days. I had dinosaurs, endangered species, cows and even aliens. I had them all. I never played with them or cuddled them while sleeping or threw them out the window. They were just there. They just simply existed along with the fact that I would just collect anything that registered under the word “cute” at that time. They used to be just sitting there, on the bed I hardly ever would sleep on (I slept on the floor for some reason), looking at me with their beady plastic eyes, their stitched on smiles simply burning huge gaping holes in whatever their manufactured gaze was staring at. It was insane. I was around twelve. I cared less about myself and more about the world. My life revolved more now on friends, choices, music and not just school and toys. My emotion vocabulary was significantly wider. They had to go. I was twelve going on thirteen.

A normal teenaged boy would simply shrug his shoulders and a) dump all these stuffed toys into his little sister’s open arms, her aqua-and-pink room ready to adopt another unwanted creature of cotton and polyester; b) Donate them to street children who could use a soft little friend to cuddle (along with some of my shirts that never fit me anyway, which is another story); or c) Dump them in the convenient mega-size garbage can, no, tank in my room. I opted for option D. Keep them. This proved to be fairly difficult. For some reason, I couldn’t stand giving them away or even just move them to the next room. I couldn’t keep them there either. It would be humiliating to have friends over. They had to go, along with the multitude of cartoon character posters plastered on my walls, along with the Goofy bedspread, along with the crayons in a Mickey Mouse mug on the desk. I was twelve going on thirteen. Something had to be done. I was twelve going on thirteen.

Since I refused to dispose of them, I stuffed them into cardboard boxes, plastic bags and plastic containers and jammed them in the topmost cabinets of my room. Now what. They were just there. Gathering dust and pollen and airborne diseases. Getting moist and growing fungus that would eventually evolve into a civilization. This went on for a couple of months. I felt stupid. Couldn’t I think of a better way to rid myself of them? I mean, I couldn’t even see them. What was the point of all this separation anxiety? Well, I guess you do outgrow some things. I began to sneak the stuffed animals into my sister’s room, a few at a time so she would barely notice. At least they weren’t leaving the house. She was happy, I was happy, and my room was significantly less kiddy. I was twelve going on thirteen.

There are no cartoon character posters in my room anymore, just an array of postcards tiled in a very minimalist way. Although I still sleep on the floor, the bedspread has been reduced to stripes, a very grown-up color scheme of blue and white. The desk now had more serious art supplies in more serious looking containers. The room looked better, now that it was without the plush toys. I was twelve going on thirteen.

I'm not twelve going on thirteen anymore, but sometimes, just sometimes, a pink shrimp or blue armadillo would wind up in my room, glaring at me with their black, beady eyes, smiling at me with their stitched-on mouths, reminding me not to grow up too fast.

July 24, 2008
Written as an exercise for Sir Noel’s CW class, with the topic “Holding On and Letting Go”