As a child, deja vu felt like a message from my older self to my younger self. Specially coded messages, concentrated for maximum grey matter penetration and shelf life. Sometimes those moments come back to me. But not with the answer, more like, OK, here I am as the adult me and this is the thing I am thinking: ABDCEFG, each letter corresponds to something. I was little and kneeling by the side of the house, near the giant hole I was making with a spoon. I remember cocking my head and hearing the letters, and knowing each one was a code for something else, and that it was coming from a much older me. Much like thinking if I could stare hard and beam my whole heart and best intentions at Tina, a long legged stuffed panda bear with a crooked nose, I’d be able pick up those same vibes later, looking as a grown up lady in those very same brown eyes. To me it was like a storage vessel. I was serious about encoding the message, I wanted to leave an exact copy of my entire emotional catalog in her tiny plastic retina. I always intended to come back and draw it back out, to breath in with my old new self every urgent message of my youth. It’s like I knew I would forget, but felt like I had to remember. To forget was to lose something worse than property.
I kept Tina on my bed for years. She was floppy and dirty and old, bald in patches where the fur rubbed off. At around the age of 12 I began to realize she was uncool, and sometimes she ended up under the bed where no one else would know I had her. By the time I was 16 and emancipated I knew she only belonged in a box. When I was 17 I moved her to Oregon. I could not unpack her. My boyfriend was old and my attachment to a stuffed animal made him seem ancient. I could not let her go entirely. I took her out of the box when I was finally alone. I sat with her and looked into her eyes, waiting for my old message to come flooding out. It didn't. Only half hazy old memories of being little, but the kind suggested by photographs, not the real secrets photos never captured. I could not throw her out but I needed her to take up as little room as possible. I bent her over my knee and cried as I cut the back of the head at the crease of the neck. I took out her weird stuffing, like gutting a memory, the effluvium of childhood on my hands, wafting upward under the force of my hard sniffle, to be sneezed back out. I put her panda stuffing, the part where the hugs were, right into the trash. I folded her feet up to her head, and her arms inward like a hug, and the whole thing in half, a sad little rectangle with panda ears. I told myself I intended to re-stuff her. Into the old suitcase of memories she went, no one would know.
Years later I was getting married. I bought a house. In it there was a room intended to be my office, which was supposed to be a place I could write and create and be alone, several things I entirely failed to do once becoming a boring married grown up. I decided to take stock of what I had become by checking out what I had been, when I ran into the rectangle of Tina. I remembered it as a promise to myself to get the message and not forget. I unfolded her strange empty form and stared into her eyes. Without stuffing they looked cross eyed. There was nothing to hold the shape. Her head folded in and her eyes clicked together. It seemed obscene. I tried in vain to decode the beam. I never could.
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