The Velveteen Rabbit
Nothing loved is ever lost, only returns in disguise
I never read as a child, but I started reading when I was a young adult. I always want to go back to children’s books, and I ended up choosing The Velveteen Rabbit, and I got emotionally ambushed. I can’t stop thinking about what it means to become real to someone. By real, I mean when your feelings decide to live somewhere, inside a thing or a person. I’m 30, and I still have a toy I tuck myself in with every night. I can’t lie about how many times I’ve wondered whether my soft-toy dog, Willa, becomes real just by being held and worried over, worn down, and whether I made her real too.
The book makes it sound simple, like love is a slow alchemy. But why do we love things that are not living? Why does it matter so much that the rabbit is real to the boy, even if no one else agrees? I’ve always believed love outlives the object it attaches to. When you lose something you love, the love doesn’t leave in the same moment. It just starts looking for somewhere else to go. Sometimes it returns to you in a form you recognize, and most often it doesn’t. Still, it returns. It comes back wearing another face.
This magic has happened to me. I used to take care of a stray dog named Maya. I loved her, and one day she disappeared from my life. I never got closure or a neat ending. There was no final goodbye that let the love close itself properly. For a long time, the love felt like a loose thread. Now there is another dog, Maple, a friend I meet in a park. I talk to Maple about my life the way I used to talk to Maya, even though I know how absurd that sounds when I say it out loud. Maple brings me comfort, and I’m grateful for it. Sometimes it feels like I’m looking at Maya when I look at Maple, just a different face, and not quite the same.
I keep thinking, “nothing loved is ever lost.” But what does it even mean in a world where loss is inevitable? Part of me wants the sentence to protect me, to tell me I don’t have to worry so much because love will find its way back. Another part of me resists it because the beauty of love is limitless, and I remember I am limited and on borrowed time. Maybe both are true. Maybe love returns in disguise, and maybe the disguise is not meant to erase the loss. Maybe it is only meant to make the loss survivable, in a silly way, in a park, in the shape of a dog who is not the same dog, and still somehow brings the same calm in me.
This little book has given me the idea that love does not always end where the story ends. It leaks into other days, other animals, other humans, other objects you keep close, and keeps trying to translate itself into whatever is available. Love comes back asking to be placed somewhere, and if you are lucky, there is a warm forehead in front of you, ready for it.
P.S. I read The Velveteen Rabbit to Maple. She loved it.
Yours in thought,
Yana