Blankets (the truth is out there)
I used to sleep under old woollen army blankets in the winter. I don’t know where they came from, but they’d appear sometime after Easter, brown with a grey stripe, and so damn heavy; heavy as lead, heavy as grave-dirt. Despite their weight, one of these blankets wasn’t quite warm enough, nor was two even, and when it was very cold my mother would pile up three or four of them until I could barely move my childish limbs beneath the weight. I liked the way they pressed me down into my old mattress, except for my feet. The arches ached, sometimes, from the pressure of the pile of woollen army blankets.
Sometimes I stuck my feet out over the side of the bed, but then I was afraid something — probably an alien — would grab my feet, so I suffered through the discomfort of the weight on my feet as best I could. Sore feet beat being abducted by grey-faced, black-eyed aliens.
I was very afraid of aliens, after accidentally watching a tv show about abductees.
I spent hours in the mirror checking my skin for signs that I’d been abducted and experimented on. Strange birthmarks, new injuries, odd lumps.
I never found anything beyond a few moles and mundane scars. I never lost time, although now there’s whole stretches of those years I barely recall at all. Not because they were bad, exactly, just that childhood goes like that. It slips away.
I was so scared of being abducted by aliens. But I also always wanted it to happen.
(If I was abducted by aliens, maybe it would explain what was wrong with me.)
The texture of the woolllen army blankets was unbearable—more like sandpaper than a blanket should be. Like sleeping under a sheep lost in the bush for a few years, all burr-snarled and fly-blown. That was what love was like in my family. The intent was there, but it was too heavy and not heavy enough. Rough, but you had to be grateful for what you got. Some people had no blankets at all.
I folded the sheet down over the top-most woollen blanket to keep it from touching any part of my skin. But touching was inevitable, and always distressing.
The worst thing about the blankets, though, was the smell of moth-balls.
The smell was awful, chemical and pungent. Like my Nan’s closet. Like the op-shop. And it heralded the coming of asthma season, when I caught every cold and flu going around, when my lungs collapsed and constricted, and every inhale I made sounded like a rusty old gate swinging in a feeble wind.
(When I was sick, my father would get out a green Tupperware bowl and fill it with boiling water and eucalyptus oil, and force me to hold my head over the steam while I cried, because I hated the smell and it never made me feel better.
Once, I threw up in the bowl. I don’t think he made me do it again.)
As an adult I learned that moth balls were made from naphthalene, and naphthalene is known to trigger asthma, among other health issues. They’re probably carcinogenic. By then the old woollen army blankets had become a feast for carpet moths anyway, more hole than wool by the end. And we don’t use much wool any more — everything is made of plastic now, and the moths starve.
I am trying to explain to you now that I feel like this.
I feel threadbare and abrasive, that I carry with me the smell of mothballs, that I’m too thin but too heavy. I feel like an old woollen army blanket, I think, as I stuff the washing machine with goose-down duvets I spent too much money on. They’re so light they barely feel like you’re sleeping under anything at all.
I feel like I’m more hole than wool, some days.
(And I’m still half scared and half hopeful that I’m going to be abducted by aliens. Maybe then I’ll know what’s wrong with me.)
