Born breaking out into the beautiful world, brokenly blubbering, I fell into a stranger’s hand. This stranger would blissfully become someone much more to my infantile heart—weak yet burning through life’s new days—as she wrapped me in a warmth that still remains unrivaled.

She wrapped me in that blushing blanket tinged with rose.

This brilliant blush color painted my early days; from rosy decorated walls to salmon dresses that pirouetted in the wind, I was surrounded by this peculiar pigment in my bleary blur of a childhood. Yet I loved it. I always loved it. I brought that blanket everywhere as if it was an incumbent necessity.

Buggily babbling all of my days to myself, I attached myself to the bedazzling benevolence of that blanket. Clouds of pink trailed after the blanket, dragged behind my baby feet. Everywhere I went, it was there too.

Every time the stars emerged to play, blazing befitting beams of dreams, with my imagination—like the childhood friend I always wished upon them for—I bounced boyishly into my billet of a bed. And every time I laid my head beneath those friendly stars—those heavenly bodies to my somnolent sense of sight—my mother, my stranger, my warmth came and buried that blanket around me.

With that blanket, she’d breathe into my mind, bothersome beasts and Borowy brutes, demons of dark places, won’t bruise you.

She breathed promises into that blush blanket, implanting fatuous fantasies in place of scintillating nightmares. She breathed sanctuary and safety in the unknown hours of dark, and it worked.

Nights of my child years—moments of fear—fled.

Yet, as I soon learned, permanent protection is a charlatan oxymoron as rebellion arose and branded my blossoming age; it overtook my senses, bossing my actions. In a burning battle of baneful words, I burned the cocoon my mother had gifted me.

The yarn someone once laboriously tied together became smoke in my eyes, drifting towards the mighty macrocosms above. And life whimpered with me.

Those demons of the dark, those brutes, those beasts came back. It was an invasion. All those whispers underneath the black sky had preserved my love of life for years, and I was none the wiser to what that peripheral pink blanket had done.

And every now and then, even with sixteen years of life, of love, of loss to my name, I still find myself underneath those same stars, wishing for that beloved blanket back.