Yarn

I know the night, I scold the night; I have made an enemy.

I don’t know what I want anymore. My view is smudged and plaqued with dandruff. I clean the lenses of my glasses to no end; what I see is not what is.

My ears pop when I get out of bed in the morning; they open every night to allow nightmares to crawl into my mind and pool there, coiling black snakes, itching for the moment I let down my guard and allow them to lick my ears clean of laughter. I hate the snakes, I name the snakes, Balenciaga, Sugar Bear, Chat Noir, Michigan, That Player on The Buffalo Bills. The dismay of night saddens and stuns my days. The nightmares are so familiar that my sweet mind allows their ships to dock in my harbour, forgetting that familiar is not a synonym for friend. I know the night, I scold the night; I have made an enemy.

My eyes are balls of yarn that spool out and wind in information. Today the yarns are being pulled away from my eyes, not towards my hands or mouth but toward the back of my throat that tickles before I cry. These balls of yarn, not white or yellow but a sickly egg color, tangle themselves up.

When I was young I got in a lot of trouble for asking if God believed in ‘left’ and ‘right’. If God is everything, how can God have a perspective that is limited to location based on left, or right? If God can see everything, at all times, there is no left or right, what God sees simply is. The balls of yarn unwind themselves from my left and right eyes to tangle into a ball that simply is; the yarn is spun all different weights, so much so that the untrained eye could tell that this yarn would be difficult to knit with. This yarn is insensible, knotted, and loud. I can’t see anything without my eyes, but the yarn is too busy tangling to notice that I need to see.

The banks of my body are greedy, asking for more capital that will only poison me. I self reflect with loathing when the yarn is indisposed. I cannot see, I do not think, I cannot be. Something about this loathing comes from my toes — my feet, toes included, are more preoccupied with left and right than any other part of my body; they are left and right, both are either and neither are both.

The yarn usually takes my hands ahold but lately it leaves them limp. A new liquid takes over from my blood and I am unable to call on the yarn. I am blocked; the hands on the clock have stopped and no longer clap when something awesome happens. Whatever replaces my blood is grainy and thick, creeping slowly through my veins. The snakes are silent, they scare me, they can eat breathe sleep in the same concrete that hardens my arteries; the snakes threaten to replace the yarn and control my hands. They threaten to hiss through my mouth and grow fangs from my teeth! I call upon the yarn, but I have forgotten how to speak — my plea comes a pathetic moan. The matter I am made of, spread thin and spun out, is a wool that nettles, a wool that stinks up a room and coats your hands. The matter I am made of drips through my hands; I try and hand it off but all my friends’ fingers are made of sivs, even if when I met them they were the Beaver’s birch built dam.

I can see the yarn, tangled. I reach in with silver hands and begin to yank the strands. I pull too hard, creating knots where there were none, knitting and purling by subconscious volition. Without the yarn I need my silver hands, and my silver hands only push away the yarn. I’m digging my fingernails in it here, now, and begging the yarn to slip, twist, and fly out of this nest and create stories with me again. I do not go to the bar, I do not go to class or the library or the cafeteria or the gas station or any place I might know anyone. The snakes are nocturnal. I am desperate, now, pulling and maneuvering the ball, trying to wind my eyes back up before the day ends, before I have to go to sleep knowing that the snakes are coming and there is nothing I can do to stop them. Even awake I am stuck in my bed! I don’t know what is happening outside. I don’t know who is knocking on the door. Without the yarn I can’t even smell the way my own mouth tastes.

I’m falling asleep without the yarn! I’m disappointing professors, maybe even myself; I have relinquished ideas of left and right to the silver hands, who know more than I do. Frankenstein was electrocuted awake; my electrocutes similarly prefigures an awakening. I have to awaken to the possibilities of myself.

I have been bogged down with delusions of grandeur for too long. I was fooled by promises of childhood and stories of Women Who Did It!; Women Who Were Authors!; Women Who WROTE! I will never achieve my dreams; this revelation in and ofitself is not what causes me dismay. It has taken me over two decades (because I have been storytelling since I could talk) to realise that what I thought was innate to me was in fact a pipe dream. This revelation is derailing. I have never stopped writing, for as long as I can remember writing. I have loved my words and cared for my words and cherished them; this passion will surely not go away overnight, but I must grow up. I must acknowledge that my brightest future is a secretarial position under a boss who looks away if I am reading on the clock.

The presence that authors my voice has not left me. In “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798,” Wordsworth writes:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

I have felt this presence too, I feel it now; this motion and spirit will never not roll through me. I do not want to waste my life on dreams of vanity; I will not stop writing, but I want to try my best to leave behind childish fancies. I cannot even comprehend how I have existed, for so long, believing that I could become a published author. It was a future propped up by The American Dream that I was sold, not The American Dream we all slog through. I never thought of myself as blatantly deluded until recently, I had simply presumed that everyone was like me; curious for knowledge, and hungry to find it on a plate of prose. I was truly not meant to exist at the same time as Colleen Hoover.

My childhood fancies, my deepest dreams, dress in fuschia bursts and purple smearings; they joust azure and shimmering silver; green and heaven’s gold blind me. I have wasted far too long painting the colors, so much so that they stain my hands and mark up everything I do. I am growing up: it is time to wash my hands and shut my mouth.