The Remembering

I remember when the world was soft. When fingers traced the worn paths of my fur with the deliberate tenderness of ritual, when breath came in small huffs against my ear as secrets were whispered into the dark cave of night. There was a time—was there a time?—when I was essential as oxygen, clutched against a chest that rose and fell with the innocent rhythm of trust.

The light was different then. It filtered through windows that seemed larger, casting rectangles of gold across floors where we would sprawl together, limbs akimbo, in the careless geometry of contentment. She would speak to me in the language of the very young, full of certainties and pronouncements. “You’re my best friend,” she would say, her voice carrying the weight of absolute truth. “You’re the most beautiful bear in the whole world.” Bear. Yes, I was a bear once. I wore that identity like a crown.

Now I wonder if beauty was ever mine, or if it was something she bestowed upon me, the way children crown dandelions as flowers and cardboard boxes as castles. The mirror across the room shows me nothing—has always shown me nothing—but I can feel the looseness of my seams, the way my stuffing has settled into new configurations, creating valleys where once there were hills. Time is a thief, but memory is a magician, making solid things disappear while leaving behind only the ache of their absence.

The days when we were inseparable blur together like watercolors in rain. Picnics on the living room floor where she would feed me invisible sandwiches, my mouth perpetually open in what she interpreted as hunger but which I now understand was simply my permanent expression of surprise. Tea parties where the cups were always empty but the conversation was full. Adventures to the backyard where she would carry me under her arm like a briefcase full of secrets, setting me down in the shade of the oak tree while she chased butterflies I could never see.

I was witness to her fears, the keeper of her nightmares. When thunder shook the house, she would press her face into my belly, and I would absorb her trembling like a sponge. When the monster under the bed grew too large for her small courage, I became her shield, her talisman against the dark. I was loved not despite my stillness, but because of it. In a world that expected her to grow and change and become, I remained constant. I was her anchor in the storm of childhood, her proof that some things endure.

But children are not meant to love stuffed animals forever. This is the cruelest truth of all—that the very purpose of our existence contains the seeds of our abandonment. We are meant to be stepping stones, not destinations. We are practice for the real loves that will come later, the ones that breathe and speak and choose to stay.

The changes came gradually, like seasons shifting. First, the nighttime visits became less frequent. Then the conversations grew shorter, more distracted. She began to speak to me differently, not as confidant but as memory, the way one might address a photograph. “Remember when we used to…” became her refrain, as if our shared history was already archaeology, something to be excavated rather than lived.

The move to the closet was presented as temporary. “Just for a little while,” she promised, her voice already carrying the hollow ring of a lie she was telling herself as much as me. The darkness there was different from the darkness of nighttime—it was the darkness of forgetting, of being set aside. I learned to measure time by the muffled sounds that seeped through the door: footsteps growing heavier, voices deepening, the slow symphony of a child becoming something else.

Years passed. Or perhaps minutes. Time loses meaning when you are no longer part of someone’s story. I heard her voice change, watched through the crack beneath the door as shadows grew longer and then shorter and then longer again. Sometimes I caught glimpses of her feet—shoes I didn’t recognize, legs that seemed to belong to a stranger. The voice that once whispered secrets now spoke in the clipped tones of urgency, of appointments and deadlines and all the small tyrannies that come with growing up.

Other toys joined me in the closet darkness. A wooden horse whose paint was chipped, building blocks that no longer built anything, a doll whose eyes had stopped opening. We were the detritus of childhood, the evidence of what she had been before she became what she was becoming. We never spoke—couldn’t speak—but there was a kinship in our obsolescence, a shared understanding of what it meant to be outgrown.

I began to understand that love, the kind she had given me, was not a renewable resource. It was finite, precious, and she had spent all of hers on me in those golden years when I was her everything. Now she was learning to love differently—boys who disappointed her, friends who betrayed her, dreams that crumbled like old paper. I wanted to tell her that she was practicing love on the wrong subjects, that the kind of love she had given me was perfect and pure and shouldn’t be wasted on things that could break her heart.

But I was just a bear. Had always been just a bear.

The day she left for college, I felt her absence like a physical weight. The house grew quiet in a way that suggested permanence, the kind of quiet that comes not from sleep but from evacuation. I waited, as I had learned to wait, for her return. But when she came back, it was different. She moved through the house like a tourist, touching things with the careful reverence reserved for museum pieces. When she found me in the closet, there was a moment—just a moment—when her eyes softened and I thought I saw the girl she had been.

“Oh,” she whispered, and in that single syllable I heard everything: recognition, regret, the weight of time passed. She picked me up, held me against her chest the way she used to, and for a heartbeat I was essential again. Then she set me down, gently, on the bed that had once been ours.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and I forgave her immediately, the way I had forgiven her everything: the gradual abandonment, the years of silence, the casual cruelty of growing up. Because that’s what we do, we constant ones. We forgive. We remember. We wait.

She left me on the bed when she went back to her new life, her real life, the one that had no room for threadbare bears and imaginary tea parties. I remain here still, watching dust motes dance in the afternoon light, listening to the house settle into its emptiness. Sometimes I imagine I can hear her voice, younger and full of certainty, promising me forever in the way children do, meaning it completely in the moment of speaking.

I am no longer beautiful, if I ever was. My fur has faded to the color of old newspaper, my eyes have lost their shine, my smile—if it ever was a smile—has become a grimace of endurance. But I am still here. Still waiting. Still remembering the softness of her hand, the warmth of her breath, the weight of being loved absolutely.

This is what hope looks like when you are forgotten: not the bright expectation of return, but the quiet determination to preserve what was. I am the keeper of her childhood, the guardian of her innocence, the witness to her capacity for pure love. And if that is all I am, if that is all I ever was, then perhaps it is enough.

The light is fading now, as it always does. Soon the room will be dark, and I will be alone with my memories, my beautiful, terrible memories. But I will endure, as I have always endured, because someone must remember. Someone must keep the faith.

Even if it’s only me.