Month: January 2017

I don’t remember learning how to love, originally.  I only remember the origins of little love-habits.

I remember holding onto my stuffed elephant, tucked safely in my right arm always– a light grey beast with pink-tinted ears. He must’ve been a foot tall, if he could have stood on his own, but he couldn’t.

He needed me.

His fur was worn down, paper thin, from all the hugs.

“If you sneeze too hard, you’ll knock his stuffing out,” my big brother would say, so I learned to sneeze into the crook of my left arm.

Obviously I learned to love before that memory, or, why else would the cloth been so loved that my poor little elephant literally wore its insides on its out? Why else would I remember my brother the way I do? Magical, certainly, immortal, maybe.

I dropped that elephant in the mud one day, when my…