Casting On

I can hold these pieces of something that seem like they’re nothing but a mess.

I envision another person picking up the bag and thinking they should just put them away because they’re creating clutter. They’re unnecessary.

I can hold them – these strings and fibers, these long stretches of silence and blank nothing.

Somehow, I hold them, and they become something else.

Feeling the rhythm in my hand’s twists and turns, these twists and turns that I’ve befriended. I’ve been knitting long enough now that I can trust it’s going to make sense in the end.

It’s going to become something I can wear. Something solid from something amorphus.

I can pick it up after setting it down and know exactly where to start. I can get lost in time and figure out where I’ve been – the fabric laying out like footprints in concrete. “Laura was here” it says in soft graffiti.

It is meditation and the messiness of life happening at the same time.

It’s beat after beat, again and again, a kind of heartbeat that I don’t have to struggle to find purpose in.

Even when the rest of my body feels heavy and weary and I’m too tired to do anything else, my fingers can flick back and forth across one another, and I can be reminded that I am still here.