you can't drag it with you all your life

I used to have a room made for daydreaming. Mornings were a golden brown glow, six a.m. light dampened by thin bamboo drapes over windows. Windows left half-open, and through them cold air filled in, like a slow fog, nowhere to go, and so it stood still. I would pull my blanket up, covering me whole, through those cool golden mornings, cocooning myself deep in white, white laundered so many times Mother said she'd have to cut them in large squares, fold them into rags, and what good rags they'd be, she said. I said no.

It had, that blanket, so common a design you could walk into any public market, grab a blanket from any stall that sold them, choose the white with wide-apart blue stripes, and flowers here and there, and you'd have my blanket.

But not that blanket. That one, remembered too much. It knew of a time when windows where half-open, and one could cocoon oneself in one's dreams. All morning.

With no one saying no.