Treasured

If you look back now you’ll remember a time when you couldn’t let go of it, when you clung to it in the night to keep the monsters at bay. The sidekick of your childhood adventures and slayer of your nightmares. Perhaps you no longer recall where it came from, maybe it was always there, but it held all your faith that this inanimate object would keep you safe.
When did you stop clutching it? When did it become a lost relic somewhere in the depths of a teenage room? Perhaps when you decided you wanted to be a grownup, a subconscious decision. Where did it end up; charity shop, car boot? Or maybe you still have it in a box somewhere. Either way it’s locked in a box in your mind marked ‘childhood memories’.
Do we not need defending from nightmares as adults? Those ones that make you feel like a child except now you’ve nothing to cling to but the duvet. Or perhaps, like me, it survived all the dark spaces in the loft, the endless moving boxes and stayed with you all these years. Ugly to most who’d look upon it but yours. A missing eye and mangy fur but you don’t care, your inner child smiles at it’s battle scars.
One persons trash is another’s treasure and that’s what it is, be unashamed to cling to it no matter how old you get. Hold tight and remember your most treasured childhood moments; imagined battles, family, friends, the kinds of adventures you can’t have anymore. And realise they’re all held within that one inanimate object, your most treasured toy.
