The Blanket

Never say more than you can get out in 800 to 1200 words, and certainly never say any less than can be said in 600 words. I am referring to words written in the English language, the only language in which I have any capacity to speak, read or write. I can interpret the ramblings of all manner of creatures, whether they speak English or Cantonese or chirp like crickets, but my interpretations will never match word for word the intended meaning of the issuer of such sounds. This is of little concern.
What matters ultimately is that no matter who speaks or what twisted tongue they speak in, it is always really me whispering something to myself through the animated biological blanket. Like a child laying in bed with its fist thrust up into the cover to make two shapes, two separate peaks, which in the child’s imagination may be two rabbits or two children or a woman and her pet dog, no matter what the child imagines, it is a true and beautiful play, but underneath, it is a conversation the child has with itself. This is not to say that if the child exists then the woman and dog do not exist, or that if the woman and dog exist the child does not. The whole woolly ensemble and the maestro behind it are one multidimensional creature, real and unreal too.
So you can see why I do pay attention to what the other peak in the bio bed spread is telling me. I listen to it no matter how unintelligible it’s ranting, rambling, squeaking, or grunting, with the complete knowledge that the child is working something out through us, talking to itself, banishing loneliness and boredom, filling the dark unending night with something. Trust the child to be present in every adversary and every friend, in every door knob and every carrot.
When I awoke today my mantra was this: "It is all me. This is my day, my day to create, and what I don’t create today, will never be created. " The possibility that this day held will never return. It will never be the same day, I will never be the same creature. What I create tomorrow will be different from that which I have, or would have, created today. Different by a 24 hour window of time.
Time is our enemy and our friend. Time is a matrix in which we may create. When it ceases to be, that opportunity to create has passed. What comes next only the child can know. Even through tears today I repeated, "It is all me."
Walking up the drab fog enshrouded street flanked by a block of construction and a block of apartments with all the personality of a no name motel, I could feel myself moving through the scene, both outside of my cracked lips and pounding temples and inside of them. Just one foot in front of the other, the cold air sucked into my lungs and expelled with a touch of desperation due to my uphill voyage, and the invisible eye watching, feeling, and perceiving the movement of one of its most compelling points of observation. Even the doorknob reflected the light back at me with an appropriate degree of meaningfulness when I told it, "It is all me. It is my day."
But even with so many cooperative elements and a fair measure of lucidity I struggled. It hurts no less to be betrayed by Judas knowing that somewhere beneath it all, it has always been you, your dream, your kindness and your cruelty. Certainly it manages to squeeze some tears from my woolly blanket head, and I walk down the stairs choking on a measure of self loathing.
Three or four times today I delivered a line or even kissed the lips of a lover and felt that I was out of character. I could see myself not as the character I usually portray, but as another character which I know and interact with as part of my apparent life. The horror of it. Not only to understand philosophically that you are that creepy clammy other, but to experience yourself as that other.
The differences between the characters constructed of the blanket are all a figment of the imagination of the management. Both the internal and external management are insisting that this personage is unique, has this or that quality and not this or that other quality. But behold! There is only one. The lint covered fabric of apparent life and its manipulator, the magician, the child, the immortal beloved. Knowing this cannot lessen the strain of experiencing it, of containing it. How much easier it is to travel unaware of the secret manipulator. How fierce and terrible and wonderful to hold within one tiny body the reality of its creation.
Less than 600 words would be to few to hold it. More than 1200 would be too much to say at once.