So there may be some new evidence to support the fact that I’m a crazy person: I have a really-not-normal tendency to treat nonhuman, inanimate objects like they’re alive, and, in fact, human.
I think that this is something I’ve done for a long time, but I didn’t really notice it until Girronster came into my life.
This is Girronster.
To make a very, very long story short, I’d always thought it would be cool (apparently, my definition of “cool” is slightly different from that of the average person) to have a giant, nearly life-sized statue of a giraffe in my house. (I mean, c’mon. It would make one hell of a conversation piece.) But because such things tend to cost upward of a thousand dollars, my mother surprised me with a much shorter version for my birthday last year. It was about five feet tall, and initially I was ecstatic. My dream had come true!
See? I’m loving it.
But by the time Brad and I managed to fit it into the car, drive it home, and put it in our living room, I’d realized that this giraffe was awfully close in height to myself. If I looked at it straight on, I could see right into its pitch-black, glassy eyes; I could gaze right into its flared and pronounced nostrils. I moved around the room, but everywhere I went, its eyes seemed to follow me. And, worst of all, because of its similarity to a person in height, it would often startle me upon entering the living room, causing me to think for a second that another person was there.
My wonderful, loving fiancé, Brad, picking up on my unease, began to place the giraffe in unexpected places, simply for the joy of hearing my shriek as I got out of (or into) the shower, came in the front door, or opened my closet. I don’t think anything brought him more joy over the next few weeks. He still pulls one on me occasionally.
You’d think that the repeated exposure to giraffe-induced surprise would dull my reaction to the thing; apparently, it just made me fear him more. I started calling him “him,” not “it.” I found myself trying to please him by giving him a fun hat or a pretty scarf to wear. I often wondered how he spent his time all day while no one was in the apartment. I also began to treat him with the utmost respect, greeting him with a cordial “Hello, sir” or a nice pat on the muzzle whenever I entered the living room, in the hopes that maybe, if I was nice to him, he wouldn’t attack me in my sleep in what would be the first step of his giraffe uprising.
And for a while, I thought about all of these things like it was completely normal.
You know, though, in my defense, it kind of is a little bit normal. Isn’t it? I mean, at least this particular inanimate object was created in the likeness of something that is alive. People give nonhuman attributes to animal (and human) likenesses all the time. Think your favorite stuffed animal growing up. Think playing with dinosaur figurines.
So as long as I limited this tendency of mine to objects that resembled living, moving things, I wasn’t too worried about myself. And believe me, it was more than just Girronster. Sometimes I would turn my cat-shaped tape dispenser to make it stare at my co-worker at the office. Sometimes I would attack Brad with his stuffed sugar glider, and maybe sometimes I talked to Brad in its voice. On our summer road trip last year, I bought a very cute but ferocious little dinosaur and kept him on the dashboard when we weren’t in the car so he would guard it for us.
A little bit crazy, sure. But, by my standards, definitely manageable.
Slowly, though, I realized that I tend to treat many, many objects as if they have feelings, opinions, and even voices. I realized this in small increments, like when I was restocking the paper shelf one day at work and I realized that I put the new paper underneath the old paper to make sure the old paper was used first, because I didn’t want the old paper to feel bad about itself for not getting used. Or when I called my blanket with Spongebob on it just “Spongebob” in conversation-- not “the blanket”—and I went on to refer to said blanket as “him.” There was one day when I lost my favorite beat-up sweatshirt that I wear around the house, and I called out for it by name as I searched for it: “Sweatshirt? Where are you, Sweatshirt?” as though it might respond to me. And, I always made sure not to leave the broken, ugly piece of cookie/pretzel/anything as the last one to be eaten, because I wanted it to know that it was beautiful (I mean, tasty) too.
However, I never actually feared any of these things. Clearly, I was teetering on the edge of insanity, but I felt that, while I treated these objects as though they had feelings, I wasn’t actually crazy as long as they didn’t evoke real, genuine feelings in me. It wasn’t like I ever cried over the sorry-looking broken cookie at the bottom of the package. And there was certainly nothing that I ever feared the way I feared Girronster.
We had an incident last night that changed this.
There has been a Mylar balloon hanging around our house since about mid-January that somebody got us to congratulate us on our engagement. I’d actually been impressed with how long it managed to stay afloat, despite its obvious, progressing deflation. But I guess yesterday it finally reached the stage where it started to sink lower in the air. For some reason, this gave it the ability to move around the apartment of its own accord.
I’m sure there’s some physics-related scientific explanation for this—some sort of thing about how when helium levels reach below this concentration, the current in the air has the ability to push it around and blah blah blah. But fuck that; it was just plain scary.
Last night, I’d just gotten into bed and was waiting for Brad to finish up in the bathroom and join me when the balloon, stirred, I guess, by our activity of moving around the apartment, wafted its way into the bedroom. Let’s leave the discussion of how it managed to duck under the foot or so of wall that hangs down into the doorway; that’s scary enough to consider. I was more focused on how the balloon slowly crept in, made its way around the perimeter of the room, and inched toward me, finally coming to rest right over the bed.
Brad came into the room to find me facing off with this balloon, staring straight at it, it staring right back at me. I answered his unspoken questions: “It followed me in here. Now it’s staring at me. Why is it trying to kill me, Braddy? Please put it back in the hallway.”
Not without enjoying a good laugh first, my loving fiancé complied with my request, and carried the balloon by its string out of the bedroom and halfway down the hallway. He came back in and got into bed. A few minutes elapsed. As I, feeling relieved, went through my final bedtime rituals like plugging my phone in and setting my alarm, I noticed a silvery gleam outside of the bedroom. It came closer. And then the balloon peered its stupid shiny face around the edge of the door, like some sort of creeper who watches other people from outside their bedroom windows. It stood still for a minute, looking me pointedly in the eye, before creeping on in again.
Son of a bitch.
Brad, through his uncontrollable laughter at me (not with me, but at me), refused to put the balloon outside again. “Clearly he wants to be in here. I don’t want to piss him off. If you want him out, you do it.” What a kind and loving person he is, confirming my fears like that.
Brad had cracked the window after putting the balloon out the first time, and it floated on over to it, presumably pulled in by the draft. I decided that as long as it stayed over there, in the corner, and not above my bed, I’d be able to get to sleep with it in the same room. But I didn’t sleep easily, and I didn’t wake up the next morning without casting a wary eye in its direction.
This sort of irrational paranoia is one of the clear warning signs of dementia, you know.
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