I already had rupa on the brain, so it wasn’t surprising that I found myself on a bit of a rupa roll.  Sitting in my apartment one day, I started looking around at my stuff and I asked myself, “Do you really understand these items? Do you know what they are and what they do?”

My eyes fell on my favorite stuffed animal — Grux — a real fur bunny toy that Eric had bought me, for a small fortune, at Loro Piana. I got to thinking, what is this thing? It is a dead animal skin, stuffed with cotton and wool, tagged with a luxury brand tag. When I got it, I was sooooo excited. I believed it somehow represented Eric’s love for me, the endurance of our relationship together, that I would be cared for and safe. Its a bunny, our token animal, soft and cute. I imagined a clear future with the two of us cuddling- up and watching TV with Grux nestled between us.

To be sure, the thing is rare and expensive. But does that fact, alone, explain my love and attachment to Grux? The answer is of course no — to become attached I needed a strong dash of imagination: The fact that Eric gave it to me suddenly meant it ‘proved’ Eric’s eternal love. It helped that I could lean into my habitual belief that money = care/love. My mind had to make it a symbol of more than the sum of its fluffy parts –pricey bunny represents tasteful and refined, the way I see Eric and myself, together, as a couple. I had to see a fun future with the stuffy, Eric and I lived happily together. And in all this, a simple little stuffy got bound up with who I think I am, who I am loved by, what my future will look like. The process of mine-ification was complete.

The problem, of course, is that for all I imagined that stuffy to be, its rupa bound nature was inescapable — Grux was sitting in my apartment, on a high shelf, because I lived in constant fear that his fur would get dusty and dirty  and stiff and eroded; change and degrade like all rupa items do.

What is more, if I was being honest, Grux wasn’t even doing what I thought he did, he wasn’t living-up to his imagined function. NY had been hard on Eric and I, it was a period our relationship was strained. So did this little stuffy do anything to abate that? If I took it off the shelf, would it make our love of one another stronger? Had it really been able to guarantee the ‘happily ever after’ future I was so sure came along with its fluffin and stuffin? If that little animal did its job, making me loved and safe, why was I sitting in an apartment, in NYC, feeling so alone and vulnerable?