The Blanket Fort
A short story
When he woke up in the morning, and his brain was warm in his skull, and his body was warm in the comforter, and the world outside his apartment still seemed like something horrible and hard and cold and like something he wished was for someone else, he pulled the cover up over his head. And it was so warm and comfortable in there, in the cocoon of microfiber cotton - a warmth that intensified but not seeming to be the kind of warmth that makes one sweat - he wondered what it would take for him to build a blanket fort. And just like the things outside his apartment which were impossible for him to acknowledge, let alone face, he did not think about - was not really capable of thinking about - what it meant that he was suddenly sure he would make one, though he was 34 years old.
He took stock of his resources. Mind moving slowly, oozing between thoughts. His limbs coiled across his mattress. Retracting, curling. He might have moaned. Sensations lingering in his brain and in his limbs from last night. Usually by the morning this would have worn off, but he’d been self-administering up to half an hour before sleep, and he must have taken a lot. There was going to have to be more. He thought he remembered there was some left in bottom of the orange bottle the cupboard at the other end of the apartment. So, that would be sorted.
Then he thought about his comforter. It suited a full-sized mattress, and was the warmest, softest piece of bedding he owned. Which probably didn’t make it ideal for the roof, as it was most likely to sag. Plus, he was a grown man - he wanted a BIG blanket fort. So he thought that there would probably need to be some form of support beam in the center, which meant he would need to use both his bedsheet and its spare in his closet coming together to give himself that larger inner-fort area. No doubt, he thought, he should use furniture to provide strong walls, or points where the blankets could be anchored without fear of collapse in their supports. The sturdiness of his couch would be very safe to put his back to, with edges that fabric could be draped over and then weighed down. Though he didn’t have any throw pillows, and only two couch pillows. She always said he needed couch pillows. Back when she could stand being around him. She’d have said he was “catastrophizing” about all of this, back then. Before.
He also counted in his head thirteen chairs in the apartment, which was surprising now that he thought of it. God, his apartment was big. Why the hell did he have all this space? Who was going to sit in all these chairs? It was only him there. Why did every apartment after your first one have to be bigger than the last? Anyway most of them were lightweight. Six were dining room chairs, two were eclectica, one was an office chair- none of which were good for the structure, as they were high enough off the ground that they might create gaps in the fortification. And there needed to be no gaps. There had to be total coverage. It would only work if nothing could get in. If he could crawl inside, and in that small, constructed place nothing without could matter.
His dining room table, then, could not take part. Between its long, fashionable, barn-style wooden planks there were gaps, and he could even then imagine the air passing through them making him cold. His air conditioning was a good substitute for feeling like people hated him. It was on full blast now, and while he was still alright under the covers in his bedroom, the room with the couch was one of his smaller rooms, and that meant it got cold quicker, so he really needed to get a move on. He was already starting to wonder why certain friends hadn’t reached out to him in a while. Why certain other friends never reached out to him if he didn’t reach out to them first. Why there were people he had called friends once who didn’t reach out at all anymore. Whether he’d done something wrong and been too stupid to know it, or if all the things people say about getting older really are true, and these sort of things just happen sometimes.
It really had to be in the room with the couch. The dining and bedrooms were too large. That the ceilings were high didn’t matter, but there was no serious anchor in either room except his bed, and using a bed for a blanket fort seemed like, not exactly cheating, but inappropriate. He had already begun to feel his mind clearing from the warm bath of multiple dosage, and he thought he wasn’t sure how he would move about this job physically without the drug buoying his enthusiasm. Or, not enthusiasm. Under potent benzodiazepines enthusiasm was not really on the table. More a gratefulness. But as he could feel it trickling out of his head, he feared that gratefulness would also run out soon, and make him unable to do the job without feeling stupid, or like what he made wasn’t good enough and therefore a waste of time. Which was really the language of ambition, and the return of it a matter of sobering.
But he couldn’t handle that today. Not today. He needed the relief today. Not that he was one of those dependents. It’s just that the air conditioning was so cold, and the comforter was so warm, and he had so liked pulling it up over himself. And he didn’t want to think about it. Losing things. He would think about it all day every day for the rest of the month. Maybe the rest of the year, or years. Maybe the rest of his life. Maybe he’d never feel like he was over them. But today he had nothing else to do if he didn’t want to, and he could keep it all away for today. If only just today.
And so he pictured a blanket fort that was everything he wanted it to be. Little pillows (which he didn’t own), and maybe little strings of Christmas lights across the canopy (which he also didn’t own because he was old, and lived alone, and didn’t own any Christmas decorations (and which, realistically, he probably would never run through it if he did, anyway)). But the imagined ceiling was one of his soft, blue, auxiliary fleece blankets, dark and assuring. And there were large pillows taken from the couch to stand as walls, though in his vision they had grown disproportionately larger than they really were, and could hold a roof over the head of a man sitting in what he still called “Indian-style” with only slightly bad posture. And he would order pizza. Cheese pizza. Not that stuff with all kinds of chewy innovations in margherita on it that started after he was a kid. Just cheese like it’s supposed to be. Like he used to be excited for. Kind of pizza that came in a huge box and that was really heavy and made people walking by see it and go “hell yeah!” out loud. And they would, too, because he would go pick it up, not order it, because it’s so expensive to order things these days, though he wished he didn’t have to think about that. Wished the fort could keep that away too. And he’d eat it sitting on the floor of the fort, and there would be the light of a television on his face, though he wasn’t sure what he’d watch. Didn’t want to think of that specifically. All TV is so bad these days, he preferred that it would just be on. He wasn’t sure how he would incorporate his 65-inch HD flatscreen into the fort without draping sheets over it, which would probably obscure some of the picture, and he was worried might even tip it off the console and hit the floor on its edge and smash. And when he pictured himself sitting crossed-legged in front of it, and watching it smash, he thought it would make him look pitiful and feel very sad, like he was being bullied. But full-sugar soda that mixed with the meds might make him feel good again, like soda used to, before a lifetime of sugar and worse made it just something you ought not to drink and didn’t do much for you anyways.
And he would live like that for a while, he thought. And there would be no catastrophes in blanket forts. And you wouldn’t need friends in blanket forts because they couldn’t fit in there anyway. And it’d be so much smaller in a blanket fort than a big, stupid apartment for a man who lives alone. You can’t really be alone when your hair is touching the ceiling, can you? The ceiling brought down low, ruffling his hair. The world three times smaller then. The problems three times smaller. Three times fewer people who didn’t like him anymore for reasons he didn’t understand. Three times fewer friends lost. Three times less empty space that felt more than just empty. And one less person that he really cared for who couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. Too many layers and folds to get through before the truth and the world could make him feel like he was alone.
Not that anything but the cold was going to reach out today, anyway. And because of that, he thought it unlikely he’d actually bother to build anything. Failing to build the fort felt like the kind of disappointment he was like to give himself. Only the pills, he thought. He was likely to get out of bed for them. Go over across the bedroom, and the room with the couch that was empty, and the room with his dining table that was empty, to where he knew he’d left them, in the cupboard, and get started.
And he did. And when he got back into bed afterwards, he knew he’d been right about the disappointment.