Love

Have you ever been truly liked for yourself? Has anyone loved you without blame and consequence and greed? The question runs rampant through your mind, depriving you of sleep and peace of mind. All your accomplishments seem to pale, seem to add to this fraud, to this false self that others love. Will no one see you as just a man? Will no one love you, for being? Then, inspiration. Like a lightning bolt to the forehead it comes, and with it you see the face of one who perhaps loves you best. You race, as a sickening nausea spreads through you, across time and space, to a time long since past, a life that you lived, that seems pale and frayed at the edges of your memory, where only the most vivid things are still memorable, and even they, in their locked cabinets within your mind have paled and aged, losing health and vitality, like old men and women, forgotten by family, left to die in old pastel nursing home rooms. It takes a while, but you manage to pry open the stubborn locks of the trunks in the vast memory storage of your mind, until finally, you unearth the resting place of your friend. You run, perhaps to the only friend you really had. You stop, breathless, before a white wooden closet door. Stalling, you take a breath, before your shaky white hand slowly pries open the creaky door, and reaching up you move aside boxes and knickknacks, all worn and torn and dusty. Finally you arrive at your prize, a long wooden box, deep, filled with relics of the past age. You pull out the cedar sarcophagus and open it up, the air within it musty and melancholy. You pull out white paper, miles and miles of white paper, and discover objects long forgotten, chewed up baseballs, tiny baby shoes, a lock of someone’s hair, an old second grade art project, a deflated football. Finally, there, at the very bottom of this cave of childhood wonders, lies you prize, all cloaked in its funeral garb of white paper. Your hands tremble as you reach for it, pulling it softly from its crypt. Reverently, you peel of the paper in one smooth stroke. What it is reveals is an old yellow teddy bear. The one creature on God’s green earth to love you for yourself. It is an old and faded thing now, its soft downy texture turned rough with years. It color, once a strong golden sort of sunflower tone, now a bleached plain yellow. It seems small now, dwarfed by your hands. Its face, once so genial and kind and cute, is now eclipse by a sense of decay. One of its eyes is missing, the stitches that make up its mouth now loose, one of its ears now hanging lopsided. Smiling, you realize that you love him, as he is, for what and who he is, and now more. You embrace you friend and feel that a wave of happiness and peace finally washes over you. Now, you can sleep.