At one point in my life I was convinced that my blanket was a fully-functioning monster shield. I mean, it’s not that I really believed in monsters. During the day, it was always easy enough to look inside the closet and under the bed to confirm that nope, monsters did not live in my bedroom. And if I couldn’t see them, I reasoned, then the monsters didn’t exist.
When it was dark and silent in my house, though, and the lights of the VCR in the living room looked a little bit like a werewolf’s eyes, it was difficult to shake the feeling that something was watching. And okay, maybe I was seven and totally old enough to not believe in monsters anymore, but that never stopped me from scurrying back to my bedroom after retrieving whatever it was I’d been silly enough to leave behind. I’d always get back to my room and jump into the bed as I pulled the blankets up all the way over my head.
Under the blankets, I was safe. There was nothing that could touch me while I was under the blankets. Something about that extra layer of cloth and fiberfill stuffing provided me with a sense of protection from all of the monsters that I knew didn’t actually exist.
These days, I hide behind my camera, because I’m afraid of forgetting. Maybe one day I’ll forget how it felt to sit on a log in the summertime and write, and how magical I thought being an adult would be, but maybe I can preserve all of that in photos. In tall trees and a crunchy carpet of dead leaves, the slow sweating of my cup of iced coffee, and the worn wooden bridge spanning a lazy trickle of a creek, I thought that maybe I could capture the magic of being an adult for an hour. Maybe I can’t capture that kind of magic in photos. Maybe I can. I guess I’ll find out someday, when I can’t remember anymore.
I hide behind literature. It’s okay not to fit in sometimes, I can tell myself, because none of the really fascinating characters ever seemed to fit in. Sasha didn’t fit in in A Visit From the Goon Squad. Really, none of the characters in that book fit in, and that’s why it was so fascinating. I can be a romantic because Gatsby was. And okay, Gatsby kind of ended up dead, but that was because of the vast carelessness of the people around him, the people who broke things without thinking.
Everyone can relate to literature, and so sometimes it becomes a shield.
The other night I walked into my living room and watched the lights on the DVD player blinking on and off, on and off. I remembered that not too many years ago they were werewolf’s eyes instead of glowing spots in the dark. If I wanted to, I could pretend to pretend that there was a monster glaring at me, but it wouldn’t be the same.
Maybe pictures and words won’t protect me any more than my blanket could. Maybe it’s believing that they could that really matters, though.
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