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Voices
Bryn Durgin and Navied Mahdavian
Voices

Op-Comic: Making the transition away from our objects

By Bryn Durgin and Navied MahdavianGuest contributors 

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We are born with the illusion that the world exists just to answer our cries, and for a while we have proof.
Then, one night, we cry and no one comes. It is here we begin to reach for what psychologists call "transitional objects."
My gramma's hands stitched Blankie before I was born. Half inheritance, half invention, I made him into something alive.
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I've carried Blankie from childhood to the bed I sleep in now. Through sleepovers, road trips, hospital stays and flights.
There's nothing abnormal about this. One study found that about 40% of adults still sleep with a stuffed animal.
Blankie once held the soft palette of infancy — pink, yellow, blue. Now he's a ragged gray.
What will I do when I've loved him to nothingness? There's too little left to repair.
But the part of me that reached for him will still be here.
Then again, so will the part of me that made him alive.
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Bryn Durgin, a writer, is the director of programming at Bookstore1Sarasota. Navied Mahdavian, a cartoonist and writer, is the author of the graphic memoir “This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America.”

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