I saw a ball of yarn under the stairs last night. It made me think of you. I don’t know why really. More and more things have that affect on me lately. Like love. The string is wound and wound, continuously surrounding itself into larger and larger being. What was once tangled and uncared for is gingerly bound around itself, the whole growing round and lovely as it expands, feeding and nurturing itself, oblivous to the outside. It needs nothing but its own being to become large and beautiful. It seems like our love was that way. I don’t know, maybe that sounds silly. You and I had all sorts of problems as we began our lives together. We started out a lot more like the disorderly strands of complicated mess that the ball of yarn must have been once. And it didn’t seem like we wound ourselves as tightly and beautifully as something so simply wonderful. Yet we did grow, we expanded, we rounded each other like celestial orbs in etneral embrace. What began so small and obfuscated grew simple and large. Large enough to hold each other. Large enough to hold another. Large enough to unravel the knots and smooth the intersections of self and other. Large enough to display some simple beauty to the rest of the world. But not so large as to be lumbering, but gentle. Soon we started weaving patterns where once there were ordinary lines. The patterns intersected and overlaid, building on one another until a larger pattern was formed, incorporating the rest into its greater self. Our love is like that. To be sure, there are errors here and there in the patterns, little mistakes and awkward overlays. But it’s beautiful.
And one day it stops growing. It has expended all the time it has, and you’re gone. You left the world. I’m left here alone, with all our love, all our built hope and treasure, yet no way to maintain the memory. Soon I’ll start to misplace the memories that shaped our ball, and it will grow mishapen and faded. It is a cruel thing to leave me with only your teasing memory that I cannot grasp. I know you didn’t mean to. We both thought we had so many more revolutions around this ball, this messed up knitting of life. But we did not. We ended suddenly and hard. You were there, then you were not. And the string fell limp onto the floor. And there I lie for the rest of my earthly days, staring up in futility at the thing we made in our shortsighted brightness. The colors are wonderfully harsh. Each beauty is a stabbing needle, filling me up with the most glorious pain man ever conceived. You were soft, strong, shapely, colorful. You were so much more real to me than life, but now I can’t remember. The colors are fading, the pain becoming dull prods of former glory. I spend much of my time to myself considering you and how we were. But moment by moment things fade ever so slightly. One day before I die I will remember little else but that we had a love once, and it was good. Maybe that’s enough.
I’m sure there’s something after the black wall of death. I can’t see you, but you are somewhere. I know not whether I will be there with you one day, or if we’ll know each other. Will se remember our love and the loveliness of it? Will we get to grow it more, or start over with perfection? Who knows but God? One thing only do I know. Our love, our little ball of yarn, we grew it and it was beautiful. That was something.