favourite thickness

when i was a kid, i had a stuffed owl called owlie. she wasn't my first stuffed animal, but she was the first i fell in love with. she was brown with a white belly and had plastic emerald-green eyes with black highlights. she didn't have any feathers, just plush. her eyes were nestled in rings of white felt and her feet were the same white felt. i loved her dearly and slept with her every night.

then, i took her with us to florida and she was lost.

my mother replaced owlie with a frog called froggie. froggie tried really hard, and he was okay, but he was no owlie. a couple years later, i took my birthday money to the store and bought a teddy bear. this bear was the bomb diddly. he fit perfectly in my arms and he smiled at me so sweetly. i christened him peshal and have him to this day.

but even as special as peshal bear is, he doesn't have one thing that owlie had. it's something i have never seen on any other stuffed animal ever.

owlie had my favourite thickness.

owlie's felt parts - her feet and the rings around her eyes - were made of felt that was my favourite thickness. i told my mom this thing about owlie, when i still had owlie. i told her and i even showed her -- this here, this is my favourite thickness. i remember telling her because it was highly important and dear to me, and she of course laughed. haha, mom. thanks a billion for your support. i was six years old for godsakes.

anyway.

i can see how you'd think, well - you loved owlie so of course the thickness of her felt was your favourite. but, it wasn't like that. it was the other way around. i didn't love the thickness because i loved owlie... i loved owlie because she possessed a physical manifestation of my favourite thickness. i loved her for it, and i grieved when she went missing.

for a while, i sought the thickness, but since i'd never measured owlie's felt parts, i had no idea what i was looking for. time passed and though i never forgot about my favourite thickness, i managed to let go the search.

then, the other day, out of the blue, i look at the toilet paper roll and i was like oh. my. god. because there it was, the toilet paper was my exact favourite thickness.

you know how the sense of smell is most closely linked to memory? well, the sense of sight falling on favourite thickness is most closely linked to calm. seeing this thickness made all the tiny shards of life lose their sharpness and meld into a whole, smooth sphere

this time, i measured it. my favourite thickness is a quarter of an inch.

it's okay to laugh if you want. i mean, even my own mother laughed at me. her laughing at me really hurt me at the time, and even looking back, i think it was a shitty thing to do, but in context, i know that having a favourite thickness is not common. something uncommon is harder to understand, and not wanting to feel stupid for not understanding, we dismiss the uncommon by laughing at it. it's like using the "ridiculous" spell on a boggart - laugh at it, turn it ridiculous, and thereby make it go away so that you don't have to face your own ignorance.

so go ahead and laugh, but this boggart isn't going away.

i have a favourite thickness, and my favourite thickness is a quarter of an inch.