I am 33 years old. I have lots of stuffed animals.

All my stuffed animals have names. There’s Morgan Freeman, a penguin that my girlfriend, J, at the time gave me when I was sick one day — I had been watching a movie with Morgan Freeman in it, so the penguin got that name. There’s the Mom and Dad Bears, a pair of Beanie Babies my father got me during my freshman year of college. I came home for break and he held them out to me and pointed out which was which — the lighter bear was Mom, the darker bear was Dad, and said, “I got these for you to put on your desk, to make sure you know that they are always watching you and making sure you study very hard.”

My father denies that this ever happened, but that’s okay. I would deny it too.

Then there’s Potato, a dog I got from a leadership retreat while I was in junior high. And Twitch, a monkey with very round eyes that looks like he’s on a huge dose of LSD, who is best buddies with a penguin with the same cracked-out eyes, named Jitter.

However, I do have three favorites (shh, don’t tell the others): Teddy Bear, Honeybee, and Harvey. Teddy Bear is my absolute favorite. I received him as a gift on my 5th birthday from my mother’s best friend, who passed away from stomach cancer. He is very small for a stuffed animal — he’d fit snugly in the palm of a baseball mitt, and he came wearing a red, white, and blue t-shirt. He eventually inherited a shirt from my sister’s Curious George stuffed monkey, which slowly became ragged, and J sewed him a little yellow shirt with three honeybees on it. He’s been wearing that one for about three years now.

Teddy Bear isn’t the cutest bear, either. He has a grumpy scowl on his face and has looked angry for all of his bear life. It’s pretty funny. One of his eyes is cracked from a bad trip in the dryer, he looks like he has cataracts, he’s missing patches of fur all over his body, and his mouth once fell off and was replaced with a new hand-stitching of black thread by my mother, which changed his expression permanently. But he’s seen so much and been with me nearly my entire life, during the good times, and the bad — but he has always made me feel better when I wasn’t feeling so good.

I’m nearly in my mid-thirties now and a big part of me says I should put him in a box and put him away. But a bigger part of me says, hang onto him for just a little longer, and to let him stay out with me. I asked my sister if I was too old for stuffed animals, and she told me that if I liked them enough, then it shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

Teddy Bear still lives on the bed, lying next to me while I sleep. He seems to move around a bunch while I’m sleeping, too, as he is always in a different place when I wake up. Either that, or I’m running a marathon while I’m snoring, and I kick him around, which is the likely explanation. And he’s seen so much; he’s seen the happy times in my life, the sad times, and all those forgotten days in between where nothing seemed to happen. He has always been there. I can’t imagine life without him. A part of me used to be ashamed of having him around. Trying to explain a stuffed animal to a girlfriend is not the best way to start off a relationship. But I’ve learned to get past all of that. He has been an inextricable part of my life, and always will be.

And the funny thing about my menagerie is that each creature seems so real, so alive, as if they have personalities written into every stitch of their plush bodies. When I look at Bear, which is what I call him now, I always feel like he’s happy to see me. But some days, he is sad, some days, he is peaceful, and other days, he is lonely. It took me about thirty years to realize that all those feelings were just a reflection of the things I felt subconsciously, deep down inside, about myself, in those exact moments. These days, most of the time, he feels old and is very lonely.

Lately I wonder if the person (or people) who made Bear are still alive. It has, after all, been 27 years. What are their names? Where was he born? His tag has long since frayed away, so I will never know where he came from. Could the hands that made him have known that they were making a little baby bear that would mean the world to a little child, who’s since turned into a man, so far away? I’ll never know. All I know is that I love him more than anything.

Part of me likes to think he loves me right back.