The Blanket

I have this blanket. I’ve had it for a couple years. My boss gave it to me when I first moved to California with my friend. Peggy and I didn’t have any blankets or pillows or beds or dishes – we slept on the floor in the living room of a big house with many rooms for a while. The blanket was so soft and ugly that I immediately adopted it and named it mine. The blanket was a dark night blue with a smiling sun face and stars and planets (Saturn) all over it. I easily overlooked its design. It was just another cover of a Relationship By Stars or Birthday Horoscopes.

The other morning, laying in my white apartment surrounded by white blankets and the morning light, I pulled this out of the ordinary ( my ordinary) blanket over my head. I had been sleeping a lot that week. I had been sleeping in since I moved in two months before, but it was one of those weeks that turned into just another one of those weeks where I would pull the blankets over my head and sleep the day away and try to find solace in dreams. This day, I created a romance. With the blanket over my head, the sun shone through the stars and planets and glowed on my hands. The night sky was just above me, and it was more beautiful in the daytime. The blue sky dropped with sadness.

A discovery:
This was something I wanted to share with someone that slept next to me. This was something I wish I didn’t discover so soon, so we could discover it together and then, when we woke up in the morning and complained, we would pull this blanket over our head and put our hands up to a blue star and smile and it would start to get hot under that blanket with our heavy, stinky morning breath, but we would pretend to not smell it and close our noses on the inside.

I felt cheated, like I had cheated on myself with more of those moments I was creating to share with someone else. The tears were lost in that blue blanket sky and I had no choice but to wipe them away and try to breathe even as I was pounding pounding pounding on the inside and the stars were falling and crashing into salty waves, sizzling up and fogging my windows.