Soul Plushies

CW: suicide discussions, carelessness with life, mention of drugs, lack of a happy ending despite a lack of death

You call your close friend of many years for the first time in a few months. You haven't called her for a while, but you've been texting her regularly, and you have a gut feeling from her texts that she might not be doing so well. She always claims to be doing just fine though, whenever you asked her about it before. Something about "deserving" suffering, which you pushed back on and never really understood but that you've decided to dismiss as a peculiar mannerism of hers.

As you talk, she first tells you about some more difficulties in getting HRT, and the two of you decide to have some fun to take her mind off her life problems. You each turn on your cameras, and you decide to show her a new orange cat plushie that you just got.

"You're a catgirl, so this cat plushie could be you," you joke.

"Awwww, meow, hehe," she replies.

You two exchange more cat noises before continuing to chat.

"Can we still meet up again IRL some day?" she asks. This is something that both of you have talked about, on-and-off, for a long time.

"Hope so, but my finances aren't looking great right now. Hopefully that'll change soon."

You suddenly remember that you have a project due tomorrow and that you wanted to do a final proofread before submitting it. She's disappointed that you have to go, but expresses understanding. "I wanted to tell you some more, but I'll have to talk to you tomorrow, I guess," you say.

"Good night," she replies. "You're very much an angel in my life. I hope you know that."

As you go to sleep that night, you imagine that this plushie is your friend, and wish that you could hold her and comfort her through whatever she's going through, like you hold your plushie.

You wake up the next day to a flurry of messages from mutual friends. They tell you that she sent all of them some message about disappearing and not wanting to be a bother anymore, seemingly out of the blue. You send her a message, staring at your phone screen, knowing that she usually responds quickly.

No response.

What happened to her? She's always online, and she should be awake by now. If nobody has been able to reach her, then...that could only mean...

You start to cry into your pillow, clutching your plushie as a way to try to hold on to memories of her. "This cat plushie could be you," you remember having told her. You also remember that you told her before about struggling with the amount of worries about her, and that she responded by trying to reassure you more often. Maybe that's why she didn't also message you when she messaged everyone else? Did she want to get out of your life so that you could stop worrying about her?

If I hug this plushie hard enough, I could tightly grasp the good memories I have of her and let go of the mental health worries I had. I could rebuild the good parts of her in my brain, without the suffering, you think.

With a start, you realize that are feeling some relief that you can move on and hold on to only the positive memories. Relief from the anxiety of receiving yet another distressing "I don't feel like I deserve love" from her again. These contradictory feelings of grief and relief leave you feeling like a shaken salad dressing, contradictory feelings swirling inside you. You hope, still, that she might still be there, as you hold your phone and read every single notification as it appears, hugging your cat plushie tightly.

And then your phone dings with a message from her. She is still there. A massive wave of relief, until-

"I took a bunch of oxazepam. knocked myself out for the night," the message reads. "hope you didn't worry too much about me. not like I deserve to be missed."

The soft cat plushie noiselessly drops from your arms and falls onto the floor.

This isn't the first time she mentioned drugs. But why did she do it now? She must have tried to keep you from worrying by not messaging you when she messaged everyone else. But wouldn't she have known that her other friends would have reached out to you? What other signs were there? What could you have done to prevent this?

When you glance at the plushie lying on the floor, you briefly think that it has invisible claws and that it that scratched a deep wound in your heart in its desparation to escape its torment.

Later on, you will come to recognize the toll that supporting her has taken on your own health. You'll mutually decide to break off contact for two months, and then gradually re-establish contact after that, with you learning how to enforce stronger boundaries and her finally finding a first foothold to handle her problems more healthily.

But that is far in the future. At the moment, you only know the fear of losing her and the guilt of knowing that you could have done more to save her.

You sigh, pick up the phone, and start composing a reply.

Eventually, you dry clean the plushie to remove the dust that it gathered while lying on the floor. After you gingerly place the plushie into the dryer, you watch intently through its impermeable window as it gets tumbled around, falling endlessly in a sealed, featureless, disorienting space.