Bear

Little brown bear, eyes so black peering at me from the depths of your fluff stuffed gut. My dog bit your eye off once, ten years ago, and I glued it back on, and there it still is, gazing on, winking into my soul. You and I, we have been together since the beginning. Before I was born into this world you were purchased and placed in a crib made with bright yellow and orange linens, and when I was at last brought home and laid down, you were there, looking with your unreal eyes into my own new born eyes. Your face is the face of a first friend, my first friend, a first silent companion in a noisy chaotic world. Steady as a rock. As constant as the air I breathed. Unmoving and yet alive, looking back at me when I looked at you. When I could take my first steps, I carried you. Now the unmoving could move. You moved with me and I took refuge in your stillness sitting upon a patch of sun dappled carpet and playing with your sweet round ears and tiny black nose. Your eyes were so clear then, large round pupils of deepest black encircled by irises of muddy gold. They shimmered and glistened, as lively as the eyes of the many tropical fish that swam to and fro in my father’s massive aquarium. Now those same eyes are scratched and cloudy like the eyes of a very old man or woman and your fur, once so plush, has worn thin in patches all over your body, but I have never loved you more. Though now I have friends who speak to me and come to me on their own legs and go away on those same legs, I rely solely on you to comfort me in the deepest dark of night when I am once again frail and helpless, a child adrift in a sea of violence. Even as I grew and acquired new toys and found playmates like myself to frolic with, and dressed in Velcro sneakers and waited for school buses and listened to moldy old women that used yard sticks for pointers, even through the years of changing into something else and talking to boys on the telephone and looking into the mirror for hours, even then you were with me, though I sometimes neglected you. Sometimes, the great flood of things that had come to fill my closets and the underside of the bed carried you out of my arms and into a dusty corner. Sometimes out of deepest affection I sealed you up in a cardboard box with letters deemed important and tiny dresses speckled with hearts that once fit on my now oversized body. Now, more than ever, I appreciate you and your silence, your strength and your helplessness which are the perfect counter points to my own strengths and weaknesses. Because you can not move, I move you. Because I will change, you are unchanging. Together we are complete, a magic pair, a girl and her gentle bear. I am learning to love you as unconditionally now as I did in those first days, when we were both new, and yet now I have matured enough to know that so many things come, but they also go, and as they curl back like the tongue of the sea returning to the endless unknown, only you remain. Sweet bear. We have found a way to stick together, the unborn and the born, keeping each other warm by the hearth of a common heart. It is this shared heart which gives life to each of us, but we two are two who know it, so that life is vivified and granted even more color by the solidarity of our bond.
Little brown bear, eyes so black, peering at me from the depths of your fluff stuffed gut, it will be you and I till the end, and at the end, when all things are blotted from the horizon like typed errors remedied with liquid white out, our union will already be so complete that our further adventures as one will have to be written by Angels on the underside of clouds with ink as invisible as we will have become.