Okay, so, it’s like 2:17 AM. My phone says 2:17 AM. I just… I don’t know. I guess I’m wondering if anyone else has these… rituals? Or maybe it’s a compulsion. It feels very compulsive. Every year, same day, same time more or less, I buy a baby blanket. Usually from that one bougie boutique near the Whole Foods, the one with the organic cotton and the really minimalist designs. I try to get a different color each time, you know? Not like, *exactly* the same one. This year it was a sort of sage green, very muted. Last year was a pale grey. The year before that, a sort of oat-milk beige. Always very soft, very… innocent, I guess. And then I bring it home and I fold it – very precisely, like how they do it in the store, all square and perfect – and I tuck it into this vintage suitcase. It’s one of those really old, hard-sided ones, dark brown leather, kind of smells of old attics and maybe a tiny bit of mothballs, even though I keep those cedar blocks in there. The suitcase is in the hallway closet. Deep, deep in the back, behind the winter coats and the vacuum cleaner attachments. No one ever goes in there, not even my husband. He just assumes I handle all the ‘storage’ stuff. Which, I mean, I do. Appearances, right? Can’t have a cluttered house in this neighborhood. Mrs. Henderson next door would just… well, she’d just *know*. She’d notice. She always notices. This makes, what, ten? Eleven now, with the sage green one. It’s not like I count them, not really. But I just did, didn’t I? In my head. Eleven blankets. All folded, all perfectly still in that dark suitcase. And every year, on that day, after I do it, there’s this weird… sensation. Like a quiet. Or maybe a kind of emptiness, but a very *full* emptiness, if that makes any sense? Like a physical ache, but also a relief. Anyone else… keep a collection of unspoken things? Things that are just there, existing, hidden from the world? Or am I the only one who does something this… odd? This pointless? It feels really pointless sometimes, but I can’t stop. I just can’t.