It’s odd how you can live day-in day-out with something (someone, my daughter would correct), and not think to say much about it. We got our new puppy Locke just a few short days ago, and I’ve already broadcast numerous photos and a bit of video of him. But no one really knows about Stella, and we’ve had her for years.

This is Stella:

She’s my daughter’s best stuffed friend and constant furry companion. She’s the one my daughter cannot sleep without at night, the one we scour the house for with increasing panic when we can’t find her. My daughter carries Stella everywhere, except to school, and her inclusion in trips and sleep-overs is naturally assumed. Stella is just there, always present, always included in what we do.

But what IS she?

I mean, obviously Stella is a brown stuffed dog. But she isn’t that to my daughter. She’s something else. Something more.

Security. Comfort. Constancy. Softness. Reassurance. Safety. Something else?

When I was around her age I had a stuffed panda — unremarkably named Teddy — who I had a similar sort of relationship with. I loved him to the point of near-deterioration, to where his red felt tongue was worn down to a pinkish nubbin and his glassy button eyes finally popped off. The eyes were eventually replaced with ones my brother fashioned by hand from construction paper and glue — white ovals with jet black circles for pupils that left him forever after looking out on the world with an expression of apparent amazement. And when the turn-key music box embedded in his chest finally died we performed surgery to remove it, a metal malignancy whose extraction left a Frankensteinian scar down his back. All of this was done out of love, love as real as any I knew then.

When I see children with dolls and stuffed animals now I can’t help but think about how hard it is to be so little and alone in this world. Perhaps the shock of our physical separateness begun at birth echoes on through those early years, a nagging but nameless anxiety we can’t quite shake. And so it makes a kind of sense that these stuffed things, these comfort-objects — if only by virtue of their solidity and our ability to physically connect with, cradle, and hold them — would make us feel less alone somehow. They are a child’s reinforcements. They are their tangible rejection of our inherent aloneness as humans.

In time, of course, children get used to that unshakable loneliness we all sometimes feel. The discomfort of their own singularity lessens. Eventually, my daughter will stand comfortably alone, as all of us do. But in the interim, Stella will be there, as long as she needs her.

And maybe longer.