When I was younger, Part I

You know, I always thought I was different. When I was little, I thought it was because I had some sort of untapped magical power. I spent countless mornings lying in my bed wondering if today was going to be the day that I would discover that I could fly or become invisible or move things with my mind. When I was 10, I read the Harry Potter book series and was convinced that on my next birthday, I would get a letter from a giant with a a tattered, pink umbrella.
These things, clearly, never came to pass. Instead, I found myself playing dress-up in my mother's clothes when she wasn't looking and playing the captured princess in my brothers' make-believe games. When I went to school, that's when things really began to come into focus. Making friends with the boys was clearly more difficult than making friends with the girls. I wasn't interested in the same things as the boys, though for the life of me, I did try. On the playground, I would try to get into their games of tag and football and baseball. But the girls just looked so happy in their tea parties under the jungle gym. I didn't understand why it was strange that I wanted to join them. "Why can't I just do what makes me happy?" I thought. When I was four, my grandmother had crocheted  a blanket for me. It was lovely really; green, white and pink. When she gave it to me, I spent hours just staring at the intricate needlework, poking my fingers through the weaving. That spring, I discovered that if I tied the blanket around my waist, I looked just like Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Sure, the color was off but I was four, my imagination would fill in the holes.
Every morning, I would wake up, eat my cereal and then tie the blanket around me and spin and twirl around my room. Jacob, the brother that I shared a room with, never seemed to notice my alleged strange behavior, but, he was 6 after all. Jacob was never one to create conflict in the family. Always willing to do whatever everyone else wanted to do, always the one to sacrifice his happiness for the happiness of others. Growing up, he was my best friend. We were inseparable. He was the one that taught me how to pick my nose without making it bleed, how to use the toilet, how to tie my shoes. And when I asked him if he wanted to play make-believe, and told him that I wanted to be the one he needed to rescue, he was all too happy to play my knight in shining armor.
It was never romantic, him saving me, purely make-believe. There was never a kiss shared between us or him sweeping me up in his arms. It was more about him slaying the dragon and chopping the lock that kept me in my cage which was really our mother's laundry basket. And typically, after he saved me, I would suddenly develop some sort of magical power that I would then use to defend us against our enemies as we escaped the castle.
At the age of 5, I had my first experience with shame. I was playing in my room, my blanket tied around my like a skirt and my mother's best friend came over for lunch. I have always loved her. She was a large person; she seemingly was so tall that if she turned her nose to the ceiling, she could lick the tiles. But not only was she large in stature, she had a personality that seemed to fill the room and infect everyone in it. So naturally, when I heard her voice booming from the kitchen, I excitedly ran to her...forgetting all about the pseudo-skirt I was wearing. When my feet touched the linoleum of the kitchen floor, and I saw her eyes widen and look me up and down, I became all too aware of what I was wearing. I remember standing in front of the two women, my mother and her friend, and feeling my face turning as red as a beet, trying my hardest to quickly untie the knot around my waist. My fingers fumbled and clawed in embarrassment.
"Oh! Isn't he darling?" my mother's best friend exclaimed with a wide smile. Her ability to look past the skirt and see something sincerely "darling" caught me off guard. I stopped fidgeting and stood there looking at her. She just laughed, swept me up in her arms and hugged me hello. To this day, I'm not sure why I felt ashamed of what I was wearing. Maybe it was because for the first time in my life, someone had seen a part of me that was reserved for the privacy of my own room. Or maybe it was because I knew that the skirt didn't match the shirt I had paired with it. Who knows? But that afternoon, I took my now very worn out blanket off, folded it carefully, placed it on the floor of my closet and never touched it again.
When my family moved from Dallas to Houston the next January, I didn't even bother to pack the blanket. I just left it sitting in the bottom of my closet, a distant memory of something I never fully understood.