Student_Voice : Tangled brown fur

Choi Jihoon

The author is a student at Chadwick International, Incheon.

The Elf King stops dead in his tracks. His hand reaches up, like a puppet’s, to take off his mask. Where his face should be is a lump of butchered flesh, barely holding together. There are no eyes. No nose. Only a mouth, with its crooked, yellow teeth, ready to rip me to shreds.

I shut the book.

Looking up at my bedroom window, I saw the petrified face of a nine-year-old boy staring back at me. I turned off the lights and prayed for sleep to come. When the Elf King’s face returned to haunt me in the darkness, my hands closed around the furry torso of my stuffed rabbit, Brown. As I snuggled him into the familiar crook between my arms and neck, the Elf King’s growl was replaced by the scornful words of my classmates. “He still can’t sleep alone! What is he, four?”

Three years passed. I was at my desk, thinking of how to answer a particularly difficult math problem. With a rush of pride, I finally typed in the answer. “Sorry, incorrect,” flashed back at me. As I scrolled down to see the solution, my mom’s head appeared over my shoulder to remind me I should be figuring out the answer for myself. I shouldn’t give up so easily. I knew she was right. But hearing the same speech for the dozenth time, I snapped. I ran to my room and crashed onto the bed, grabbing the nearest thing and holding it close to my chest. It was my stuffed rabbit, Brown.

A few months later, I’d finished packing for a school swim meet in Thailand and was looking around to see if I’d missed anything. My eyes landed on Brown. I sighed and unzipped my suitcase, cramming him inside.

After a blur of rigorous races and nights spent exploring Thailand, it was time to return home. I was collecting the last of my things when my swim coach came running into the hotel room, saying the bus was about to leave. I scrambled out the door and onto the bus.

As we drove away, an odd feeling of having left something behind lingered inside me.

My heart stopped.

Brown.

I could picture him on the hotel bed, moving farther and farther away from me. Would I ever see that stuffed rabbit again?

As the bus’s engine rumbled, memories of Brown began to trickle through me like water through a sieve. Looking into his eyes, I imagined he could understand every unspoken word in my mind. Around Brown, I felt free. I felt like myself. I never needed to pretend.

When we step outside, we put on a mask. We engrave what we want others to see. We’re afraid that when we take off this mask, when we confess our fears, mistakes and loneliness to the great abyss of society, there will come crashing down the terrible weight of judgment.

As a result, we walk down the school hallway with a careful swagger. After watching a touching scene in a movie, we dare a glance toward our companions, scrutinizing their faces for signs of emotion. If their eyes shine with tears, we let our own tears fall; if they show no reaction, we don’t either.

We can only be ourselves around true friends — the ones who won’t judge the messy storm of emotion inside. No matter what ugliness may lie beneath, they stay beside us. Although friends like Brown never move, they reach up and take the mask from our face, revealing the beauty that had always been there.

Yet, how had I always treated Brown? If a classmate had entered my hotel room and seen the stuffed rabbit, I would’ve laughed and asked if he seriously thought I cared about such things. I would have made up a story about Brown being a cheap souvenir. In that fraction of a second, I may have even claimed he was not mine.

After a long journey, a box with “Thailand” in the return address found its way to my home. At last, a twelve-year-old boy ripped the box open, pulled out a stuffed rabbit, and stared at him for a long moment. Then I smoothed out his tangled brown fur.