By Ilse Eskelsen
You are her, but she is not you.
This is something that you perhaps already know, innately, but not something that you are willing to be conscious of. You are conscious of very little except for adoration. Everything in you yearns for the fatality of her touch, how this being who is not you and yet who gave a piece of her soul in service of your animation destroys you with her love. A rip here, when she pulled at you too savagely in a moment of fury. A tear there, where she tugged at your stitching to calm her fears. Holes scattered through the fabric that is your skin, natural things, products of a decade of self-serving affection.
You do not know what it is to die, but you know that it is coming.
You also know that the creature pacing the so-familiar floor of her bedroom is different from the one that made you. You are… flummoxed by this, to say the least, but flummoxed in the unreal, half-detached way of every feeling that is not love. The girl who birthed the animate you was a loud, laughing, feather-light thing, one who gurgled your name and tore through the house with you tied around her neck, streaming behind her like a superhero’s cape. (How purposeful you felt in those days!) She is so quiet now, silent but for her steps on the rainbow-colored rug and her muted murmurs of assent into a cell phone. Heaviness seeps from her body into yours. Her frown is the color of a ripened plum.
“Thank you for doing this,” she says. “I don’t know where else I could go.” She pauses, then smiles, weakly, as the voice of one of her friends echoes through the phone. You notice veins of strawberry-red in her eyes. “Yeah. Just down the street. See you there.”
When the phone disconnects, you reach for her. You are a simple thing, but this you can do. It’s more a mental than a physical exercise, a tug on the tether that ties a child to her lovey, a satellite drawing in its center of gravity. She glances at you, and if you had a heartbeat, you would feel it quicken.
Her eyes dart away as quick as sunbeams, and she moves swiftly to her dresser, pulling a drawer open, then pulling out its contents. T-shirts are tossed in one pile, underwear in another, and then she goes to her bookshelf and grabs a thin stack to add to the heap. You don’t know what to think of this, but you do know that she’s left her old favorites from her childhood behind, and dismay bubbles through your fabric.
She turns to her desk and stills, eyes frozen. You are so much hers that you see through her eyes a framed photo of her younger self thrusting a pewter trophy toward the camera, her parents flushed with pride beside her. She was so small, then, still young enough to carry you everywhere without shame. Young enough to love in the simplest, most uncomplicated ways and to be loved in return.
I love you, you try to say to her. You were never very good at speaking, but sometimes she understood you. I love you. Come feel my soft folds, cry into my cloth. I won’t mind. I love you.
Instead, she moves so suddenly you sense rather than see it, smashing the photograph flat onto the desktop. Then she shoves the homework left out from yesterday into her backpack and moves on to her closet.
Why won’t she come to you? You want her to come to you. Because this is what you are: her comforter, her friend. Her lovey.
“Lovey,” she used to say. “Lovey, lovey, lovey. Make me feel so nice today.”
And you would whisper in her ear that she was special, that she was a hero, that she had a fairy’s eyes and a golden smile. You would use every ounce of the magic she had placed in you to sweeten her pain and consecrate her every hurt. But oh, is she hurting now; you can see it in her face, red like it always is before she cries. Please, you tell her. Let me fix this. Wipe your eyes and nose on my skin, and I will make it all go far away.
A couple of dresses fly onto the floor. She slips out for a moment and comes back with deodorant, a toothbrush, tampons, her makeup bag. A comb is next, then a tangle of cords. Then everything is compressed into a duffle bag, little forgotten things added rapid-fire.
This is when you realize she is leaving.
You don’t know much about the world outside this house, but you are ready to go. You would go anywhere with her. You would burn for her in a human heartbeat. You would rip yourself open stitch by broken stitch if it made her smile.
These are not emotions. The only emotion that really matters is love, remember? These are facts. You are her, but she is not you. The part is made to serve the whole.
She zips the bag closed and hauls it to the door. She gets her backpack and puts it on, then glances out the window with its driveway view. She turns back, scans the room, and hesitates. Her eyes land, at last, on you.
If you were a human, you would swallow. You would smile like humans do before they cry. You would hold out your hands to her, then wrap her in your human arms.
You are not human, so you wait.
Her steps are slower than you would’ve liked, but she reaches you. She picks you up, and you are glad. She rubs you against her cheek, and if you could sigh, if you could sing— instead, you speak.
You don’t have to grow up, you tell her. You don’t have to do anything you don’t like. You can go to birthday parties and eat cupcakes from the store and watch movies about talking dogs. You can run through rainstorms and dress up Barbies and climb trees. Just keep me in your pocket, won’t you? Use me as a napkin, drag me through puddles, bury me in dirt. I won’t mind. So long as you love me. So long as I am with you.
A tear soaks into your skin. You can feel how much she wants to say yes.
But there is something else she wants; you can feel that, too. It looks like something you don’t quite understand. It looks like freedom, or sunshine, or something else intangible and far away. It looks like walking out of this house and never coming back. Don’t, you beg her. Don’t.
Because she’s not bringing you with her, is she?
Pain rips through you, dizzyingly bright. She drops you on the bed and wipes her eyes.
Stay, you say, but she can’t hear you anymore.
There are so many things you would do for her. You count them as she walks out the door, backpack on, duffle in two hands. Trail through mud, be chewed by dogs, get lost on crowded city streets. Bear stained-ink marks, bandage cuts, be stretched and strained to make the roof of any blanket fort or the costume shawl for any play. But as the pain strikes every fiber of your cloth, you ask yourself: would you die for her? Would you die?
There is no time to answer. There is never enough time at the end. There is only the stillness that comes in the absence of animation, the quietness, the smooth nothing that erases the part when the whole no longer cares.
She has left, and she does not need you.
You, her lovey, are a piece of cloth.
