Interrupted Thread

Hands that know a loom before the mind joins them - wool through warp, wool through warp, the small click of the heddle like a word repeated until it forgets its own meaning and becomes purely sound. Purely thread.

My grandmother's hands did this. Not the hands in the museum case - those are posed, arranged, made still by someone who understood the motion but not the morning. Not the cold floor. Not the tea going cold because she forgot it again. Those hands in the case are my grandmother's hands with the morning removed.

The thread carries what it carries. Not story exactly. Not memory exactly. More like the weight of repeated motion - the way a riverbed holds the shape of water that is no longer there.

I said the thread carries what it carries. I should say: carried. Past tense. Because the machine came in 1953 and it was faster and it was cheaper and the thread that came off it was identical in every way except the way that matters: you could not feel the morning in it. You could not feel the cold floor.

Now the thread is broken. The end frays into filament and each filament holds a smaller version of the weight until the weight itself dissolves into fibre and the fibre into air and the air into the space between my hands which are not weaving which are not holding which are open and empty and waiting for a motion they have not yet learned to begin.

Still here. With the thread where it stopped.