When I was a toddler, I had an unhealthy attachment to a raggedy white blanket I’d christened Geekee—a silken square of heaven that clung to me like a second epidermis. Geekee was not merely a blanket. Geekee was a lifestyle. Tattered, stained, and reeking of a distinct sour-milk-meets-armpit funk, Geekee looked like it had been rescued from the wreckage of a shipwreck and then dragged behind a Greyhound bus. But to me, Geekee was spun moonlight. Its frayed corners were my talismans, which I rubbed obsessively against my cheek like a junkie chasing the next dopamine hit. The soft tickle of that threadbare fabric was my lullaby, my Xanax, my spiritual compass.
To my parents, however, Geekee was a public disgrace—a dingy square of shame that broadcast to the world that they were too cheap or too neglectful to buy their son a clean blanket. “It smells,” they complained, pinching their noses. “It’s disgusting.” They said I was too old to drag Geekee around like Linus with a trust fund. At four, I was allegedly a grown man in preschool years, and Geekee, they insisted, was holding me back like an emotional parasite in silk form.
Thus began the war: child versus parental regime. I defended Geekee’s honor with the righteous fury of a mother bear protecting her cubs. I refused to eat unless Geekee was in my lap. I screamed during bath time if Geekee wasn’t nearby, watching like a guardian angel woven by machinery. I slept only under the comforting weight of its matted threads.
My parents, of course, resorted to psychological warfare.
Then came the infamous cross-country move—from Florida to California, land of palm trees, broken dreams, and emotional betrayals. Somewhere in the swamplands of Louisiana or perhaps the desolate asphalt wasteland of Texas, my father, who I now believe was channeling Machiavelli, pulled the ultimate con.
“Look!” he said, pointing out the opposite car window. “A baby alligator!”
I took the bait. Like the sucker I was, I turned my head. In that moment, my father performed the sleight of hand that would make a Vegas illusionist weep with envy. With the dexterity of a pickpocket, he yanked Geekee from my clutches and flung it out his open window like yesterday’s trash.
The wind, he told me with faux solemnity, had sucked Geekee away. My cries reached operatic levels. I screamed, sobbed, demanded we stop the car, mount a rescue operation, conduct a blanket-recovery SWAT mission.
But my father kept driving. “We can’t stop,” he said flatly, as though reading from a war manual. “Besides, Geekee is now keeping the baby alligator warm.”
A lesser con artist would’ve stopped there, but my father gilded the lily. “The poor little guy has no mother. Geekee’s keeping him company now.”
And just like that, my grief was hijacked by empathy. The idea of a lonely orphaned reptile swaddled in my beloved Geekee soothed me in a way no logic could. I imagined the baby alligator curled beneath Geekee’s filthy folds, comforted by the scent of my skin, the ghost of my touch. Geekee had found a higher calling.
It was a lie so cunning, so diabolically effective, that it’s now family lore.
That was the day I learned that grief, properly manipulated, could be repurposed into myth. And that sometimes, the only thing crueler than losing your favorite blanket is realizing your dad could have written propaganda for a dictatorship.
Cinemorphosis 