The Brave Little Tailors

Visible mending, Flora Collingwood-Norris

I tore a hole in my dress yesterday. (Well, the cat did it, but it seems unfair to place blame.) It started as a barely perceptible loosening of threads, but voile is delicate, and my shifting widened it into an ugly break, like a capital L, harsh and jagged.

I got 50 wt. linen thread that I carefully coated with tailor's wax, and my sharpest Misuya needle.

I made a mess of it.

The fine little grids of fibers just collapsed under my frantic poking, and I couldn't see where each tiny line connected, and what went where, and how to make it whole again.

In the end I had a ridged scar of stitches — an eyesore as a reminder of a mistake.

I realize that it wasn't just my lack of skill that disappointed me; it was that I wanted the fabric to have never been torn. So now I'll wear this thready keloid on my chest, because throwing it away isn't an option.

This morning, I did pretty much the same thing with a friendship. I tried to fix it, with as much skill as I possess, with the waxed thread of my words, and in the end I turned a tiny rift into a scar.

I see you doing that. Not you specifically, but you generally.

I see you frantically stabbing at the fabric of these days that feel like the end, and making it better one time, worse the next. To each other; to yourselves.

And really just wanting it to have never been torn.

So I'm not alone in this tightening of my chest and this prickling heat at the corners of my eyes. I'm not alone in being less gentle than I should and more sensitive than I intend.

We are hurting so much and hoping so much and all raging at all the little threads we can't keep straight.

At least, I think so. It could be that I'm imagining this weird, universal bruise, but somehow I think that we are — so connected to each other but so isolated — all a tender, breath-fine patch of loosening threads.

Solidarity. Sometimes that feels like all we have left.