by: M. R. Vega
People speak, the voices assume, unaware of the whole, and come to their own preconceived notions. They rarely take a moment to listen or watch, feeling as if they’re overstepping in being an observer, but god forbid, they come to a baseless assumption and put their two sense to object of the little they actually know.
The woman you loathe made that blanket you drape yourself in day and night when you’re cold, tired, or feeling that you need to be covered by peering eyes. Though we both know the only eyes watching you are mine. My eyes gaze in admiration and with a partial scarcity of spite depending on the issues at hand. Fifteen years and that blanket is showing its age. Fifteen years and half the planets were so delicately sewn into its long black fabric. Now they hang loosely or have been torn in frustration, or hurry. More likely it was frustration.
You permitted me access to your dwelling that fifteen years ago. I came with a few books, two pairs of jeans, too many black shirts, and that blanket. But I came with a flurry of tenacity and energy that didn’t equate to what either of us could assume would become what we are now. The blanket was something I held dear as it was a gift for my 18th year of living. I felt honored that the woman who stitched it and had sewn those precious planets in took the time to show me such consideration, such ample time to bring a warmth and graceful cool when I found it suitable. Fifteen years ago, I gave it to you as I had no money, had little but a couple hundred to my name, and since I had been accepted as your family, I only found it right to give you that careful gift to adorn you and drape over your shivering body in the dead of winter.
Little did I know that it’d become a testament to our love and the falling apart of what we once were. Fate has a funny way of showing that, doesn’t it? At first, I saw a thread come loose, near our first big fight, didn’t think much of it as I was so absolved within myself that I couldn’t do such maddening and stupid things.
That next year it became a constant found on the futon, then the loveseat, and then the couch we purchased together with our child. Ten years together and still the blanket survived, draped on the arm of your favorite corner, but little did anyone see that those threads of the blanket were showing more and more. Regardless of the evolution and the growth or disarray we each brought to one another. That blanket was a consistent reminder that our love was strong, formidable, and commendable. Fate started showing that may be something to be reconsidered and quickly, surely, the planets started to fall. Space and the incessant splashing of planets sewn across the whole of that dark blanket fell. The red planet, somehow stayed, resolute and stubborn, it was nearly etched and twice stitched into its fabric unlike the rest of the space-strewn pieces, therefore was the last to go until there could be nothing but darkness.
We lost our touch, forgot who we were to one another and that blanket started sharing that reality as it became nothing but a reflection in how we saw what we had become. Sadly, shamefully, I neglected you. Like a coward, watching the blanket we both were so proud of fall apart, I ignored the blatant realism in its fraying edges and the planets missing. Knowing it was that of how our relationship had shattered, like a wine glass to never be reconfigured the same as it was before the fall, I turned the other way. But you knew it too didn’t you? You rarely used it anymore, shoved it behind the bedroom door to collect dust and be replaced by a sherpa woven serape.
Well, what doesn’t kill or break can be made anew, can become something stronger. I saved those torn and frayed pieces…I collected the red planets strewn under the couch and rounded up all the remaining suns and Saturns that found themselves new places of residence within the couch seams or tucked under our son’s bed. They’re slowly being patched, slowly being reconfigured to bring us to a new light. There’s a beauty there huh? An unrequited love that neither you nor I care to push away and with that knowledge, I can see that hope…so I make a new blanket, not forgetting what we were, but pushing through to the new becoming that makes us, us. That blanket still is there but it’s making is of something stronger, something stoic and refined that reflects the growth of you, the growing of us, and the becoming of what we can forever be.
DreamDarkStories 