Do you think your childhood stuffed animal still waits?
Do they listen for the sound
of your legs flexing to rip your flannel nightgowns up the side,
the way you moved their arms to perform the Macarena,
the way you begged them to talk back
once the hall light went out?
Do you think they miss your small hands,
your bitten-down fingers, your whispered secrets?
Do they wonder where you went?
Do you think they miss you?
Do you think you miss you?
George, Curious, always. Yellow t-shirt, baseball cap,
teal cotton hair-tie triple-looped around his monkey wrist.
I picked him out at Bob’s Surplus,
along with a white-shirt that came with its own small, plush monkey.
I really liked monkeys.
Mom told me not to tell Gillian
because she already thought I was spoiled.
I peeled the red-cursive Curious George ™ off of his chest,
tied my Mickey-Mouse baby-blanket around his neck like a noose,
and that’s where it stayed.
I had a habit of leaving George in my second-grade classroom,
on the ledge of the piano, that no one played but was always open.
And my dad had a bed-time habit of driving two and a half miles to the school,
hoping a janitor was still around, probably using his Police Sergeant badge
to get the door open, then bringing George home like a firefighter
pulling someone from a burning building.
Some nights, he didn’t make the drive,
and I would tiptoe down to the couch where he slept,
stand over him like a night hag until he woke up.
Then he’d sigh, shift, let me have the couch,
and he’d sleep on the floor.
I’m the age now that he was then.
I wonder if his back ached.
If he wished I’d outgrow this sooner.
If I ever thanked him.
My back could not handle that.
God bless good fathers.
Or at least, fathers that can’t say no.
My mom made fun of the tag sewn to his seam,
called him Toilet-Paper-**** until I cried.
When I cut it out, she made up a song
about Georgie Porgie kissing girls, then boys.
My brother laughed and laughed.
They loved to watch me get upset.
It was the ‘90s. You could say anything and laugh.
You could say anything and make a kid cry.
George stayed in my bed, getting smaller, misshapen,
heavy with embedded dog hair from Jasper, Allie, Roxy.
He went to sleepovers, summer camps,
perched on pillows in South African wine country,
woke up with me in Cairo to the Call to Prayer
and a cart of teenshoki pulled by a braying donkey.
He went with me, always. Until he didn’t.
George was stuffed into closets, sat dorm rooms where all I did was cry,
moved into apartments where I couldn’t find my footing,
moved back in with Mom, on a bookshelf in a room where old collages
climbed the walls and I slept too much, or not at all,
where I wrote countless poems then wrote off years,
where I sprawled on the floor in too many bodies,
and knelt down to pray for the things I couldn’t articulate.
I tucked him under my armpit the night my left breast was cut off
and I didn’t know if I’d ever be done recovering from something.
He is still in my bed.
I travel a lot, and when I leave him behind between unnecessary
pregnancy pillow and the Taylor Swift blankets,
I feel like I’m betraying something kind of precious, kind of sad.
I usually feel kind of precious, kind of sad.
Does George know that about me?
Does he know the long, brown tangles and bitten-back fingers
that leave are the same ones that took him home in 1997?
Does he know that I did tell Gillian?
She thought he was cool.
Is yours as much yours as George is mine?
Do you think either of them know
they were the first thing we ever trusted?
Do you think they still wait?
