Origin Memory

A dusty upstairs room, the owner long gone, the house long abandoned. Memories of grandchildren visiting, laughing, playing. Older and younger, parents and children. Happiness, loss, sadness, dust.

The last visit a memory, a much-loved hoodie forgotten under the bed. Half black, half white dripping down from the top. Worn out elbows patched with plaid flannel. The inside of the hood patched the same way. The drawstring long since removed, coffee stains and worn seams, chewed sleeves with their own tiny patches. 

A well loved hoodie that had once belonged to a college student. Something that should never have been left behind, but travel is expensive and shipping impossible....the hoodie, forever lost. 

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I woke up with the sun in my eyes. I hated the sun, it meant I had to be somewhere, do something. I pulled for the hood I knew was there and was stopped by something. Ears? What? 

Thinking of that, I didn’t remember having eyes either, or paws at the ends of my sleeves. Looking down, I noticed I also had a pair of legs sprouting out from where my bottom hole had been before. And...a tail? 

I blinked in surprise. This didn’t seem like a dream, and even then, I wasn’t sure I had dreams before. I was just a hoodie, after all. I had faint memories, fuzzy, of being a sweater. Long days perched on a human frame, a body that was not my own but as close as my body was now. Soft days on a line, drying with my fellow clothes. 

But now? I felt things. Specifically one knot deep in my chest like a tangle of thread. And that knot had a name. It was anxiety, I had to be somewhere. I knew it as much as I knew I was no longer what I had been, No longer just a hoodie. I was more than that now. Anxiety pressing on my chest, hard to breathe, hard to think. The sun still shining, mocking me with its knowledge of what I didn’t know. Everything unraveling.

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It took me over an hour to calm down, over an hour of laying on the ground, trying to remember where I had to be. Nothing came to mind, and eventually the knot loosened. If I couldn’t remember now, it probably wasn’t as important as I thought. 

Over the next several days, I learned all I could about my new body, between bouts of the anxiety that swirled at my core. My body was soft, nicely rounded around the stomach and arms. Very unlike the body that had not been mine before, the bony shadow of a memory that had worn me before. My paws were large and soft, with purple thumbs that matched the eyes I now sported on my face. In the centers of my paws and the bottoms of my feet were lovely squares of purple plaid fabric, the same plaid inside my hood and pocket, the same plaid patched on my elbows, tail, and ears. 

I was half black and half white, the white dripping into the black, and the black splotching against the white. I had two horns and a mess of fur on top of my head, between a pair of long ears that stuck up straight, ears that flopped forward awkwardly when I pulled up my hood. 

I loved my purple eyes. But as the days progressed I noticed the right one couldn’t see like the left could. While the left eye saw the world, shapes, things...the right saw only light, and once I was aware of it, it was a distraction that made me dizzy. The light would drift across my vision and make me trip, or walk into a wall, or just make me too dizzy to move. And so I found a tiny square of cloth, pink with a heart, and tied it over the eye as a patch. Unlikely as it was, it helped to use only my left eye, without the dizziness that had accompanied using both.

Breathing hurt sometimes, and whenever I became aware of my breath, I got scared. What if I just forgot how to breathe? What would happen if I breathed too much? Pain was interesting as well, some pain like tripping and bumping my knees felt dulled, like when I had been a sweater and my seams had strained. Other pain like breathing and light was sharp, but in a good way, like when patches were sewn on.

The house I was in was empty, but for a few wishing weeds floating around the ceilings, and a couple pizza rats and carrot ferrets that fled whenever I came near. The entire place was quiet, almost eerie but for the overly cheerful way the dust always seemed to dance in the sunlight and moonlight trickling through the windows. A layer of dust in every room, undisturbed but for the tracks myself and the animals made, pathways of exploration. Abandoned furniture, forgotten clothes, discarded knick-knacks. Every clothing item I passed, I ran a paw along, hoping that whatever had given me life would awaken some of these siblings as well. But no, I was well and truly alone.

Eventually, I got bored of my wanderings in this house. Exploring every room yielded only memories that weren’t my own. Photos of places I’ve never been, creatures I never knew. And inside each one a longing. I wanted memories of my own now. I wanted to make memories and visit places and get to know creatures. Perhaps even make friends.

And above all else, I wanted to find out where my anxiety was leading me, where it wanted me to go before it was too late. A way to satiate the tangle at my core.. 

I was perhaps one, maybe three months old when I left. Maybe more.

I looked back when I was outside, when I left. The house where I’d been born was a giant structure, the door at least 15 times taller than I was. The weathered wood had peeling blue paint, the windows glinted cheerfully, miraculously mostly unbroken by time and vandals. A giant withered apple tree sat in the yard, the tiny remains of its last harvest decorating the grass. And the fence, five or six times my height, was an old greying white, slats missing here and there, plants growing up the sides.

And then, waving to my birthplace one last time, I set out down a dusty road, following a thread of a feeling. It was time to go find where I belonged.