Please welcome today’s guest writer, Leah Sienkowski. Leah graduated in December 2013 with a degree in biology and a penchant for poems. She is currently living in Grand Rapids, wherefrom she plays pastoral nomad and dabbles in marketing.
She is walking past the yarn shop with her cold hand inside someone else’s, and she is taking note of the length of their hand, unclasping her fingers to feel where her hand ends and theirs begins and to measure the difference.
It was there in that little shop, years before, where she learned how to knit one strand of yarn with four double-pointed needles. She was twelve then, and she nestled into her new craft alongside women six times her age, contemplating how two sharp branches can build something so soft. It was in this little shop where she first fell in love with the language of pattern and became lost in it.
The hands that the young woman hold move too fast for mittens. They are gone before she begins the second fingerless glove, even before she begins the fingerless fingers of the first glove.
The body that belongs to these hands is always taking time off and trying to stretch it out. They feel it gnawing away at their skin, its fibers grating like teeth.
They are the sort that believe that there is a better kind of time out there, if only they can find it, one that will fit them perfectly. They do not realize that they are rubbed raw from taking time off and on and off and on too many times.
The first mittens that the girl ever knits are for her father, but he does not wear them, because he is afraid he will ruin them.
Time is never quite big enough to contain her father. Either he stretches time out and minutes become shapeless and slack, or the future speeds off without him.
Only when he runs fast enough can he free himself from the ill-fitting garment of time. For an hour or two, time fits him perfectly. The past and future interlock; he is living like the yarn itself.
The girl knits her life into socks and mittens and sweaters. Her mind balances on wooden needles and her body channels itself into a single strand. In this way, she holds moments in place: dropping nothing, holding everything.
Later on, she will knit a pair of socks for someone who is an excellent recipient of gifts. Never before has she knit a pair of socks. She has always heard how hard it is to turn the heel. She thinks about how funny it is, that in this world, feet are born with a permanent bend at the ankle.
In doing so, she will take apart the partially finished fingerless glove and consider how a garment can grow from a single strand, and from a single slipped stitch, can unravel.
She will begin the first sock from the strand of the old glove, letting the unfinished creation hang from the new one, like a rabbit hangs from the mouth of a fox.
She will be absorbed in her work, her body poised in concentration. With each tiny click of needle against needle, she will dive deeper into the substance of creation.
Inside the yarn-shop, the women are doing the same: they are still knitting. Each time they finish a mitten, they begin another, the first stitches of the new mitten coming from the tail end of the last.
In this world, time is a garment being knit and unknit, all at once.
