I was, although seemingly, this was not as true as I once believed, happy to be a yarn.

My strands perfectly wove into one another, my length neatened in a sturdy spool, I had no real edges to speak of, no discernible imperfections, one could barely see my end, and my beginning was safely tucked away out of sight. Although some may say our lives as yarns are limiting,

I found comfort in its immovable predictability.

There was nothing particularly noteworthy about my beginning life, I, like many yarns, got left, forgotten. I don’t want to place any blame here on any particular force, after all this is part of what it means to be a yarn, to be an afterthought, endlessly set aside.

It can be lonely of course when you are in constant waiting to be, (our meaning, we are told when we are new, is to be woven into a masterpiece) yet, it is a sorrow not unexpected and therefore not all that bitter.

But in a moment like any other, when everything seemed to be as it always was, things began to change. Around me grew dark, a wetness that was unfamiliar to me creeped into us, and events raveled that I could not explain even if I wanted to.

After what felt like the length of my entire being light returned, and we were plunged into a warmer wet, I felt relief instantly, and it lasted some length, until I realised the life had been draining out from me as I enjoyed the deceptive comfort.

The details here are hazy, I remember only fragments of being, half alive, or maybe less, as we let the slow passage of moments regain ourselves.

It was late in October, the air had not yet turned warm and dry as it has a tendency to do this time of year. The wetness went right to my very middle, to the very end of my beginning.

My very essence has been diluted, weighed down, I exist here but haunted, sodden in every fibre of my being.

And then the cold, a coldness that I have never felt, the incongruent, intangible, inescapable force of that which permeates every strand, every twist of my length. The blackness was to consume me, this was my fate, and I must accept that.

We sat there moment after moment, growing colder, growing darker, becoming less and less able to save ourselves, being lured into what seemed such a tempting fate.

Paralysed by indecision, and the uncertainty of who we were in this chaos, I resigned myself to life as it now was, and yet something beyond me had started to happen, an unravelling of myself.

And I fought it, with all the strength I could find within, I fought it.

Being a yarn was all I knew, I had been a ball all my life, content in my purpose, never questioning, never wishing. Yet my strength was not to be enough. We were unraveled.

What I knew to be a whole must be shed, it seemed the only way to outlive this obliteration.

Hanging here in strands, fully on display, fragile and damaged yet not without yearning, I am learning to be at stillness with all that has happened, I am growing calm with the unassailable fact that my life is irreversibly different from that which I had imagined, that which I had been raised from seed to know.

There has been unavoidable pain and indescribable loss, my fibres have been assailed over and over, and yet I do not feel empty as I once did in the aftermath, I do not feel that hollow rot is an inescapable end.

I could not exist in this alone, I am powerless to move my ends in any way that is meaningful by myself.

In the early days it was so easy to forget that this did not happen simply to me, we began this saga as a 6, strangers to one another, but now we rely on one another, we weave in each other’s ends where we are not able, we support each other’s strands, we are now a part of one another.

We may not be the same as we once were, I certainly am forever altered, but through our destruction we have found a new way of being, one that for a humble yarn like myself feels perhaps less like lessness, and more like newness, a reimagining of what it means to be a damaged stained mess of twisted fibres.

And through everything I have lost, I have found a life, not the life I would have chosen, nor the life I was told I would have, in fact, not a life that was within the capacities of my imagination at all, but it is a life nonetheless with an aliveness all of its own.

And I feel undone of course and raw, as if but one of my strands remains keeping me together, and yet there is a richness.

I would not return to my other fate, rather, I’ll spend an eternity, here.