Blankets, by Craig Thompson (2003)

My friend recently told me about her relationship troubles. While she inevitably felt sad at the prospect of things ending, she moreover mourned the wasted time, effort, and emotions she had invested on the other person. She regretted how all seemed to come to naught.

Similarly, Craig Thompson's graphic novel Blankets deals with relationships, memory, and artificial space. It depicts the author's first relationship: one that began out of a two-week trip to the city, with a girl he barely knew but was kindred spirits with. It details the excitement and travails of infatuation: the prelude to the first kiss, shared silences and gazes, and the eventual physical separation following a relationship borne miles from home. And it is this artificial space that many of us can relate to -- how relationships stemming from constructs (college, proximity, companionship, and summer, among others) eventually deteriorate and vanish. In the end, we are left with nothing but tangible reminders of better times: a photograph, a letter, or a blanket, none of which appease the resulting emptiness.

Yet ironically, the most beautiful part of Thompson's narrative is a vivid description of our first waking moments following a beautiful dream that we do not want to let go off. We open our eyes, struggle to enter reality, and hang on to the vestiges of that dream's memory. But soon, we fall back to the routine of daily life, and can only vainly hope to return to that dream we hastily abandoned. Eventually, we doubt the dream's very existence, and for good reason: it was ours and ours alone. In contrast, a relationship both birthed and lost in constructed space seems more like a distant memory, too -- except that we shared it with someone else who can attest that it was once, for all intents and purposes, real.

My friend continued sharing her emotions, and her concomitant regret. In hindsight, I realized that Blankets's final frames perfectly offered my friend succor. The author reflected, as he walked through fallen snow and left behind fresh footprints: "How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface -- To make a map of my movement, no matter how temporary."

In the same way, the death of a relationship and the vanishing of memory can lead to the birth of a new self: one who holds neither grudge, nor regret.