The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, May 30th. It is the 46th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Crystal Lake American Little League
There’s a pink blanket in our puppy’s crate right now. It’s soft. It’s warm. On Monday, she briefly pulled it over her face while I worked at the desk next to her.
I bought that pink blanket at the Mishawaka Target on a June night in 2014. Emma and I were in our first year of dating, and we were both in South Bend for summer classes after changing majors. I was excited to spend that time together. I was thrilled to spend that time together. I was overwhelming in the pressure I put on us, 19 (me) and 20 (her) years old, still figuring a whole lot of things out.
I bought the blanket on one of the first nights we were in town. She was in the dorms on campus, and summer housing for students that year was clammy and humid and not infested with bugs but had enough bugs that she had to think about them. We were getting things for that dorm, and for her breakfasts before class, and she touched the pink blanket and said how soft it was and I bought it for her, and time and time again that summer she pulled it over herself or we pulled it over ourselves and it was warm, and soft, and good.
It was a hard summer. There was the pressure, but there were other things too. My sophomore year had ended disastrously, shedding courses I would have failed, hightailing out of a track I didn’t want to be on but had gotten on through some mix of inertia and ambition and haste. That spring had been rocky for us, rockier than a college relationship should be, but we wanted to be with each other, and so the rockiness continued. I was paranoid and obsessive about all kinds of things, relationship and otherwise, and the fact that one of my summer courses was an existentialism class where we were subjected to movies made by people feeling the dread of the universe didn’t exactly help my mental state.
Emma felt awful, too. We later learned she was iron-deficient, but we didn’t know that at the time. We just knew she felt awful. So she’d cry, and my stomach would clench like fists upon itself in vague fear and cloudy guilt and other feelings I still don’t have names for, and the pink blanket would help her feel better, and her feeling better would help me feel better, and we made it through.
The pink blanket has remained. It was a good investment. It stayed with her through those last two years of college, and went with her to D.C., and came with her to Austin, and its role changed from comforting our distress to just providing comfort, even in the comfortable times. And then we got a dog.
Fargo (that’s our puppy) has been sick a good amount. The fourth night we had her, she started vomiting repeatedly and we had to take her to the Vet ER, where she then lived for a day and a half while Emma went to work and had to work and I sobbed at home and tried to work and at one point that afternoon I walked the eight blocks to the Vet ER so I could walk through its parking lot and be close to this little furry thing I hardly knew. Fargo got better, and we got through all the bleaching and isolation parvo requires, but her gut still had its issues, and one day I took her home from a morning of examination at the vet and got her up on the couch with me and the pink blanket happened to be there, and she snuggled into it for a big puppy nap. Now, it’s in her crate. We think she likes it. She likes things like that. Blankets and towels and places to rest her head while she snoozes. She’s feeling a lot better. So are we. But we aren’t far enough from her feeling sick to feel secure.
Things don’t always get better. There’s that trope that they do, but they don’t. Some things don’t get better. I know this. I don’t want to discount that fact for those who’ve borne its brunt. But personally, so far, things have always gotten better, and I think that’s what does happen most of the time. I think the pink blanket helps me remember that.
Next week’s essay: On the Seasons
