Stuffed Teddy Bears (Fiction)

We liked the darkness. The way that the stars were dangling in the sky, like they were yellow paper kites being flown by the sun. We loved the stars.

We would watch, your head on my chest. We would bring a blanket, the same blanket that sat in the corner of your closet underneath your old stuffed animals. You would pick them up so gingerly, like they would fall apart, tell me that they were fragile, like memories of the past.

They were the past. They were everything you had that didn’t get burned away in a fire, the things that you could touch and hold and cry over. Even though you said you were done with tears. “There’s no more sadness,” you would say. You would swear it, joke about it. “There’s no room for sadness, it burned down.” I could never tell if you were serious, never could tell if you were lying. I wasn't sure if you missed that house or not.

Your eyes would always say something different. You would smile, but I could never see it in your eyes. There was no light there, nothing to show your happiness. It was a dead smile, burned down.

I told you that once and you looked at me like I was a little bit crazy, like I was telling you lies, yelling. I never tried to yell at you, I never wanted to yell at you.

I wanted to love you. With every inch of my body. It was in my skin, in the patch of grey hair at the back of my head, the crooked middle finger on my left hand. It just was, and I never knew how to explain it to anyone — especially you. It just happened, it had always just happened.

We were something that just happened. There was never any reason to it, just the fact that it was. Because we were both young, because we were both stupid. I like to think it’s because we just were — We were alive.

But “were” was the only thing that mattered now. Everything was stuck, stuffed away like the teddybears in the corner of the closet, lying down on top of that old plaid blanket that you were always so fond of.

We were looking at the stars and we were falling apart.

We were kites, falling from the sky.