I have this security blanket.
Not some figurative pyschobabble.
Not some beaming aura over my head.
Not some philosphical translsation.
I own a shredded, thirty one year old blanket that embodies Ragedy Ann and Andy patterns long since past its prime. I mean, I hate the thing. I despise it. It's tattered and torn and sits in my closet with pieces of string barely holding it together. There are times I pull it out to wonder why the hell I keep it. I mean, what am I doing with this thing? There is little, if any, resemblance to the gift someone had once given me as a newborn (I can only imagine, anyway).
Fluffy, newly cleaned smell that makes your heart jump as you bury your head in sumptuos pile?
I don't think so.
The batting-so-old-it-hurts-your-cheeck cloth that I secretly attach to myself in the midst of personal drama? UGH. The thing bothers the piss out of me.
And here I am, a thirty-one year old woman living with the past stuffed in my closet. Pathetic.
The blanket is sitting on the top shelf in the form of a 3x3 representation of my past. A memento from a man I barely remember. A piece of fabric that continues to haunt me and my need to keep it close. I keep it tucked away save the most secret moments that I hold on to a tiny shred of past life.
At some point, life has to go on. The blanket has come to represent what I cannot remember. Feelings, emotions, pieces of life that were woven in the material. Times where the blanket may have been wrapped tightly around me by others. No faces. No memories. Just the vaguest recollection of another era.
And now there is a sense of forboding I feel just looking at it. It stares me down every morning as if to say, "Grow up and get on with your life". This piece of innocent tailorship is the epitome of my baggage in the most domestic form: My inability to come to terms with the loss of my father. My penchant for emotional toil and needless suffering. My constant state of recovery from just about everything addictive, drama included.
Tattered lives. Ragged edges. Softness shredded by such self propeled emotional wear and tear. It makes me angry. I loathe the sight of it. It's the bad relationship I have been looking to end. Over. Kaputz. Ciao. This part of my life that I have been SO ready to let go.
And the time has come to let go of keeping the skeletons warm. Life goes on. When we gain our own integrity, the security comes from life now, not some tattered shred of the past.
Grow-up time. Let go time. Burn Baby Burn time. Screw airing, the time has come to throw out the dirty laundry.
