I know how it started for me. Little Pillow.
Many little kids have a stuffed animal or a security blanket. I had those, too. But I also had Little Pillow.
Little Pillow was a four panel red calico quilted thing finishing off scraps from the child’s sized blanket on my bed.
It had a moon and dark sky behind a red cottage, with a quilted chimney and smoke and a road ribbon of the same material leading up to the double-stitched door.
I can’t say where or from whom we got the blanket. I can say that I was terrified to use it. Stains and rips and smears and any number of potential degradations (and my father’s enraged reaction to them) made a moat between me and easy (like the beauty) enjoyment of my fine yellow moonlight quilt.
As a fetish object, Little Pillow felt less perilous. For one thing, it was a pillowcase. Perfectly square, not that big, one inch handkerchief hem all the around. Four equal panels. Numbered and illustrated, 1 and 2, and 9 and 10. 1 and 2 were smaller renditions of the moon and the house. 9 was tulips, echoed on the quilt. 10 was anemones, either the flower or the sea creature with long stems, i couldn’t tell.
Little Pillow was cleanable, being a pillowcase. This mattered because I was a messy sleeper. By messy I mean “sickly” and “weepy.” By sleeper I mean “sick” and “weeping.” I don’t know why, who knows why, everyone knows why, sleep was tough to come by in my house. At 0 and 1 and 2 I was colicky and fretful; I also had some upper respiratory things right off the bat. Disgusted by doctors’ allegations, my father doubled down on his Nat Sherman’s and declared the problem with me was not holding my head up.
It is important to understand my father endured horrific child abuse - “endured” being the operative word, rendering him angrily deaf to the need to protect children. He therefore sought to solve my deficiency (occluded breathing) with high rise pillow configurations. They changed all the time. 1, 2, 3. Try hypoallergenic. Try a rolled towel. Not soothing. They also didn’t work. I continued to rasp and wheeze and cough and gasp and rattle.
Little Pillow, perfectly flat, lightly padded, in one both pillow and case, never in need of changing, never did change. And in its patchwork laminated nightly by my drool and my tears and my other joyless humors, felt and smelled and tasted like me. It was small for a pillow but almost right for a shawl of some sort, a fabric shield, and I held it up against me that way when my father carried me up against him.
I never had a pillow I yelled into. I had a pillow I chewed the floppy hem of. It was Little Pillow I could not be without, at night, by day, in the car, in the kitchen. I had fevers often. My parents would put ice in ziplocks inside Little Pillow. Even au naturel, the thin batting cooled off so quickly. With my eyes closed, humming from the heat, I would lie with my burning face against the fabric tulips until I could smell them melt, and when I then rolled over the rush of coolness grafted onto my cheek. Pure, reliable relief.
If I bled or threw up or sweated or phlegmed onto those folk art panels, all it took was a spin in the washer for me to get my object permanence back by next bedtime, max.
Pillows are so aesthetically important. They are jewlery for the bed. Functional jewelry, like Apple Watches and wedding rings. They lift body parts that need or want lifting, for injury or intimacy. I stuff them in around me for maximum bolster. They are marshmallows and I am cocoa. Matching sheets and pillowcases continue the thread, further reinforcing regulation and consistency. Throw pillows must be understood as handbags, alike in variety, style, and utility.
Pillows need to feel good and they need to look good. There’s so much going on in them. They’re the boxes your dreams go into! They’re the headless Canadian girlfriend everyone gets a letter from. They change the look of a room instantly and a bed can’t be finished without them. I don’t know many grownups who still have teddy bears or Linus pelts. But every grownup I know has a pillow.
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