Fried-Egg

Name any object or animal, and there exists a plushie toy-version of it: a gamba plushie, a half avocado plushie (including kernel), a plushie in the shape of a succulent plant. The existence of a Fried Egg plushie therefore does not seem that strange.

Mies, the girl hugging Fried Egg in this image (a tad possessively), loves her plushie. Her love could be over just like that - that’s the way things go. But until that moment, there is almost nothing that can stand in the way of the love between a child and her favorite plushie.

Affection for a thing without a heartbeat. It is something that all of us can relate to. Take my father, for example; his heart aches when his car is parked out of sight. After all, people might want to harm it. But even when it’s parked in front of my door, fully visible from my window, he will stress out. A while back when he was visiting, I asked him something. Instead of answering, he was fixated against the window. Instead of talking to me, he was preoccupied by a seagull that sat on the roof of his car. "Bugger off!", he told the bird. If I had walked outside, stepped onto the street and lay down yelling in that moment, he would not have noticed. Some feel this way about their cars, some about a golden pen or a precious heirloom. Well, Mies feels this way about her Fried Egg. A deep feeling of love and connection.

This wasn't even her original, first Fried Egg (just as my dad owned four Twingo's in a row). How can we explain that we as humans, regardless of our age, can become so attached to our belongings? When is it the right time to break up with our stuff? And what happens when we do not part with the objects, but the objects part with us?

This happened to Mies. From one moment to the next, everything that lived in her bedroom was gone. Not only her belongings, but also the belongings of the neighbor downstairs and the downstairs neighbor of the downstairs neighbor, and all the belongings of her father and mother. Everything was gone.