On my Christmas list I had
several things, the first thing I added was, “a high-end and high-quality down
comforter.” This was not because I
thought that my lifetime companion-partner would cheap out and buy an
inexpensive down comforter, it was that after seven years, I know how he would
feel walking into the bedding department of the local Bed, Bath, and Beyond
store. Scratching his head through his Hemi engine themed ball cap he would
like to just point to my scribble of “high end” and the salesperson would get
the hint.
I desired a new down
comforter because the one on the bed was fourteen years old. It had traveled in
my move to Dallas, then back again. It saw every life event in the last
fourteen years and was now just a shadow of its former self. In the last year, if you moved it just
the wrong way a cannon of feathers would shoot out. A cascade or tickertape
parade of down that would cover the dog an anything else the multiple holes
were aimed towards. Parts of the ghost comforter where completely empty of
down, just sad yellowing cotton held together by my determination.
I was odd how easily the
request topped my Christmas list, as the ghost comforter did; at one point;
mean the world to me.
In the fall of 1996 I was
planning to set up house for my first, real relationship. We had decided to
move in together and were scurrying like happy, gay crabs to collect things for
our first home. Both his and my leases happened to end at the same time, until
then we would shop for what we would need. Growing up with out the simple
knowledge that bedding wasn’t all animal themed acrylic blankets, I loved that
our first purchase together was “a high-end and high-quality down comforter.”
The future seemed so bright snuggling warmly under that down comforter.
As life sometimes happens,
he became ill. We, and life abandoned our plans to live together. Soon his
family stepped in to help.
On a sunny day in June, 1998
I wandered through a garage sale. It was on a well-manicured driveway of the
sister who stepped in to help six months earlier. The items were nothing
exciting, just your average garage sale stuff. The kind owned by single man who
had succumb to a non-disclosed disease. Maybe cancer. As I walked through the
discarded household items, I could feel the weight of the entire family burn
into me. When the sister had organized the clean out of his house, my cries
that some of the items belonged to me and somewhere jointly purchased, had
fallen on deaf ears. After filling
a bag with my own clothes I picked up a down comforter lying on the
cement. I quietly shelled out $50
borrowed dollars and walked down the drive to my truck. Even though it was
June, I wrapped my newly acquired blanked around me and hopped into the cab and
drove away.
For the next fourteen years
that cotton bag of goose down was my remembrance of what had been and what
could have been. It was a memory filled and my prized possession. As life sometimes
happens, the cotton turned yellow as it aged, and holes tore in the fabric and
my memory. Holding on like a gay Miss Havisham I clung to the comforter as if it actually
held the memories of my long dead relationship.
Material items
cannot possess another’s memory. If you fall prey to this fallacy you create
your own Great Expectations. I will always have my
first love whether I cling onto an old blanket, or have the
possibility to make new memories cuddled up in bed with my new down comforter, with
someone I love.
