A Worn Sort Of Gold

I'm typing this wrapped in a gold blanket that has curled around my form so often that even when there is no Sarah to be held, it curls in on itself, even though I've only had it a couple of years. It is a remarkably comfortable thing. It was originally one of those blankets that is so soft you just kind of want to spread it out and rub your face all over it like some sort of incredibly tactile cat, but in the three or so years that it has been mine, it has dulled - for lack of a better word. It's like it softened while also getting less soft. It is worn, now. It isn't a shiny new gold anymore. Rather like a favourite necklace, it has been used and loved and held,  and there are little evidences of that in its appearance.
I... this is a very odd description, but it's the sort of blanket you'd use to curl up with a good book in a secondhand bookshop. You'd not want a new fluffy blanket that still smells vaguely of the elsewhere-where-blankets-are-made. You'd want one that had been lived in a bit. You'd want one that is used to holding a person through the highs and lows of a paperback novel with pages yellowed with the caressing of absorbed hands, the spine destroyed from constant reading, and a few tell-tale graves of tears on the final page. You'd need a blanket with experience of that sort of thing. One that doesn't mind a cat twining sinuously through your limbs as you read. One that will give you a peculiarly blanket-y hug when you get mad at the world for not being like a book, and the hug will make you feel better even though the world is still an awful place full of people that you'd hate if they were characters. You would need a blanket that belonged in a room full of books, messy in a purely cozy way that reminds you of places you've always sort of liked best, full of cock-eyed lamps for dog-eared pages.
My gold blanket is not soft like summer wind anymore. But it is still soft, in the way that it knows I need it to be. I don't want a blanket that looks like it belongs in some sort of poncy housekeeping magazine aimed at the sort of people who watch Oprah with fanatical devotion. I want this blanket, because in the past three years, we have gotten to know each other. I know the corner that feels best against a fevered forehead, and it knows when I just need tangible proof that something is there, that I haven't gone insane. I know the side that works best in summer when nothing actually wants to be in contact with anything else, and it knows how to keep my toes warm during the January nights when I'm exhausted and don't care about anything but the softness of my pillow.
I've always preferred moonstones to emeralds and silver to gold, but in this case, if it is a very worn, lovely sort of gold meant to be used rather than kept on vain display, I'll have that.
Because it does rather compliment the delicate pastels of a pale afternoon, and the inky darkness of midnight rain. Because gold mixes well with the mahogany of my hair and green-grey of my eyes.
Because it is poetry, in an achingly soft and tenderly domestic sort of way, and most of all because it is the closest thing to home that I have found so far.