I think about this quote, “to be loved is to be changed,” often when reflecting on how the people or things I have loved, and the people who have loved me back, have inevitably changed me as a person.
I also think of it in the way I’m twenty years old and still sleep with five or so stuffed animals on my bed. A bear, a rabbit, a panda, an otter, and a black cat. From second year to third year, I’ve since freed my furry friends from the storage boxes they called home over the summer and placed them onto my bed in my new house-share. Their beady eyes bring me back to a conversation I will probably never forget. A conversation that triggered me to start my writing journey. One that took place probably this exact time two years ago in my first-year flat kitchen.
My housemates from first year were a great mixed bunch, I miss them dearly. Cory, Katy, and other names not beginning with a ‘kuh’ sound, like the knights of the round table debated the normalcy of owning stuffed animals, in all their infantility and sentimentality. Katy is a bit older than me, from California. Even though we had grown up in different cities and had known completely different people so far, we seemed to meet in the middle on the importance of sentimental value. Now only to contradict myself do I expose the fact that the thing I call ‘My Baby’ is a white rabbit from Primark I bought only three years ago, not a childhood keepsake. I purchased the rabbit for myself back in college, at seventeen years old just after splitting with my boyfriend of two years. Who I was then and now are all memories absorbed by this sweet rabbit. Bunny, which is her government name, is inanimate and omniscient all at the same time. People who have seen or held Bunny only feel the soft weight of her silence. Her inability to respond and to speak. I see her ability to absorb; to weather my storms; to grow warm in the blankets of a different accommodation bed year after year. The things we collect have their own pasts, pasts before us where she was made and priced on a shelf. To love her now is to love how her roots grow into any new place I seem to need her company in.
Bunny knows me from when I cried deeply for months over that boy, but she also knows me from when I smiled into my pillow about others after him. She met people she wouldn’t see again. Those I also wouldn’t see again because I had made that choice for them or for me. She’s seen me leap for joy after opening my university acceptance. She’s seen me pack my clothes and books into boxes to take to her new home and ridden up front with me in the car back to Manchester every year since then. I’ve hugged her to my chest in the flat kitchen when Katy and I were held hostage by a mouse at three in the morning.
Although I had loved her, and changed her in many ways, the experiences she had shared with me were preserved in her misshapen fluff and loose threads.
Katy showed me this picture of a stuffed animal transformed by its owner’s loving embraces, with the caption “To be loved is to be changed.” I looked at all the ways I’d changed Bunny just by her being there in some way through all the new experiences I am having since moving away from home. At one point I realized I hadn’t washed her since I got her. Who even washes stuffed animals anyway? What are you people doing with them that requires such vigorous cleaning? It felt sacrilegious to wring out all the memories she had collected in her fur. The good news is I did wash her, because some might say hygiene is more important than nostalgia. Bunny didn’t fluff up again or look white and new like the day I got her. Bunny’s stomach was now less plump and offered more striking evidence that I probably roll over her in the night. Her upper arms remained limp where gravity had run its course, redistributing her synthetic stuffing to all the wrong places. Her ears weren’t bright pink again, only brighter in the middle but still washed and grayed round the edges.
Although I had loved her, and changed her in many ways, the experiences she had shared with me were preserved in her misshapen fluff and loose threads. I introduced her to Katy, and she asked, “Oh wow! Is that from childhood?” and I laughed and showed her the ‘Primark’ tag with washing instructions, which I ironically did not care to follow during bath time. I introduced her by name, her identity being more than just a toy. Stuffed animals are like a roadmap of all the left and right turns one takes in life. You may spill your coffee on someone in public and get soaked by rain on your way to work. At the end of it all, the furry friends watch you potter about the house, put your socks on the radiator and your white sweater in the wash, and warm the little spot in your bed between the duvet and the pillows. They love us back during all the hard times; they just can’t tell us.
Katy also shared with me, a new stuffed friend among old ones. Her study-abroad walrus, which she picked up in the airport on the way to Manchester, where rabbit and walrus species meet in a parallel universe. Mr. Walrus was a new addition but of the same sentimental value as any other. The items we curate, and the stuffed friends we deem fit for comfort, are all part of the same environment. There is an absence of competition as it truly doesn’t matter if something is from childhood, an heirloom, handmade, or available in dozens of colors and styles off Amazon. They all come together to mark on the map where you were and who you were at the time of purchase. We love them, we use them, sometimes we break them. If we repair them, then it’s all part of how we change them.
During this conversation, Cory chimed in on an old friend he once had.
“Fatso was a fat bear.” He then described Fatso’s iconic red scarf and that fact that he doesn’t know where Fatso is anymore. We joked that the bear is probably tucked away amongst boxes under a bed with the birth certificates you need but can never find at the right time. Most people never truly get rid of old friends, or if we do, they are found on charity shop shelves waiting to be loved and changed anew despite their innate history. Their memories are passed on, but the past is only known by the toy, not the buyer. It would be rather confrontational and uncomfortable if they could tell us about the things they’ve seen and heard in all their non-biodegradable lifetimes. I imagine they’re quite traumatized little creatures. So, I hug Bunny, and tuck her in at night, and clean her every now and then. She has seen me change from teenager to ‘adult,’ though I wouldn’t go as far as to say I know it all. No one does, except the stuffed animals on your bed that truly have seen it all.
