I’ve never been the type to need a lot of things.
I don’t collect lots of keepsakes. I don’t hoard tons of mementos.

I keep some of both, of course. I’m not a monster.

Usually, when my family divides up what’s left behind (too often in recent years), I say:
“As long as someone has it, that’s enough.”

Not this time.

This time, it’s a ceramic frog.

An ugly one. One made out of what seems like chalk and flat paint.

One that originally belonged to my grandmother.

It sat in the background for years, watching everything in my childhood home.

During a particularly tough time when I was a child, I wrote something on the underside.
A message.
A wish.

A hope.

I remember carving those letters on the bottom, hoping I wouldn’t get found out, wouldn’t get in trouble and doing it anyway, because I needed something solid. Something I could hold that would hold me back. As if people go around checking the bottoms of tchotchkes anyway.

Just a few words to tether myself to the world when it felt like it was disappearing.

No one knows they’re there.
Not even the person in the family who has now decided it’s important to them, too.

And I want to be fair.
I want to be generous.

I want to once again step aside.

But this frog has brought something fierce and primal out of me.
And I’ve finally realized why.

A few months ago, I remembered something I forgot as a child, and hold on because this sounds facile and all, like a second-grade teacher talking, and just know I’m flinching too:

My feelings matter.

They’re not shameful. They don’t need to be shrunk down or polished up to be allowed.

They’re not “too much.”
They’re mine.

More than they’re mine, they’re valuable, maybe the best thing I own. They’re powerful. They can make things. They can undo things. They can build. They can restore.

And sometimes feelings remind us we’re alive.

We can just look at them, stop shrinking from them, stop pushing them down and away and hating ourselves more than a little because what kind of person…

And sometimes?
We can even ask for what we want.

And when it matters?
We can go to the mattresses for it.

Put that frog in my hands.

I’ll kiss it.

Maybe he’ll become a prince.

He always was, to me.

He kept me safe.

Or maybe what I wrote on him kept me safe.

Maybe both.

Either way, that’s my goddamned frog.