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do you think I don't know cigarettes are fatal?

[annie dillard]

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I'm in a knitting store. It's just been that kind of a week. I can't seem to get the taste of metal out of my mouth.

I'm looking at the quilting supplies. I love the idea of quilting, and standing here makes me feel like the sort of person who can make them. Creating a quilt means taking different things and turning them into something that tells a story and keeps you warm while you nap on the couch, and today these seem like the two most important things I can think of.

There's this thing called a self-healing mat in front of me. You're supposed to use it when cutting squares of fabric so you don't destroy your furniture or craft table or whatever. It's made of this rubbery stuff, so when the razor slides into it the rubber just meshes back together. I touch it, and it feels dense and solid, like the floor of a middle school gym.

There are things I just can't seem to forget. The ones that live so far down they don't make me angry or sad anymore, but they make my chest hurt. There are times when I'm certain I've laid them down, and all is well. And then there are days or nights when I realize I've been mourning my whole life. That there's no such thing as self-healing.

There's a woman a few feet away stacking skeins of yarn on a shelf, bundling the wads of bright wool by color. I let the quilting supplies bend and blur in front of me and watch her, and suddenly I remember being taught to spin yarn, a long time ago, by a field worker who only spoke Spanish. I was terrible at it, and I mostly remember him leaning back in his chair and watching the clouds moving in the distance while I snarled the fiber and kicked the pedal in fits and starts.

He would stop me at intervals, show me again how to hold the oily handfuls of wool, how to feed them into the wheel, how to pedal smoothly so the wheel purred. Then he sat back and let his mind settle again, left me to my tangled wool and black thoughts. Maybe he was wondering how he ended up here, on this porch, with a girl who so rarely and reluctantly strayed from cotton-polyester blend.

Despite this, I liked the wheel. I liked the way the pedal rose up and dove down. I liked the pointed wooden nubs, the way they traded places in a blur, the way wool looks entirely different as yarn but still smells like sun on the back of a sheep. I liked being an agent of transformation.

It's time. This is what I realized while standing in the quilting section of this store. I was never meant to be a self-healing mat, smooth to the touch, with scars just below the surface. A buffer for sharp edges with that impersonal new-tennis-shoes smell. Sister, we're not here to protect the furniture, I wanted to tell the friendly woman stacking yarn.

It's time to be wool, nubby and thick and textured. I feel in my bones that this is more like my body created, always different and perfect for this task. I'm like you, I try to tell the yarn, using my wool-telepathy. I was once part of something living. I remember.

This is what I want, to be able to become something else entirely under skilled fingers, to bend and turn on a wheel, to smell like grass and oil. To change, to lengthen, to claim a nature that makes me new.