sewing skills could use some work
I’ve been knitting a blanket for a friend of mine for such a long period of time I can no longer remember exactly how many years ago I started knitting it. She’s been my friend since my first year at Bishop’s University. The blanket is a patchwork of color, multiple rectangles sewn together, entirely made by knit stitches. Talia, the friend who will one day own the blanket, will be visiting me in a month. My friendship with her, unlike the work on the blanket, is not constant - we were closer when we both attended Bishop’s University, and now we go weeks without messaging each other. I sometimes worry when I finish the blanket, ideally will be within the month, our friendship might go when she does. I don’t want it to, though, so I will probably put the effort in to continuing to communicate with her.
A patchwork of everyone I ever loved would have so many holes in it that it would be a more like a pile of rags than an article of clothing. People I loved are not necessarily people I currently love. So if it's a patchwork, some of the patches have had a seam-ripper torn through them, leave holes behind. Ironic, really, considering patches are usually meant to hide holes.
There's a hole where my first ever friend once was - Grace, who used to violently attack me when we got into arguments, who I once could not imagine a life without. She was in my patchwork quilt for seven years before I took the thread and started tearing. I thought she would actually murder me by the end - she tried, twice. We had broken into a swimming pool so there weren't any lifeguards, any adults at all actually, and after I jumped, she jumped on top on me, her feet on my shoulders, keeping me underwater. She must have loved me, or at least regretted or feared what she had done. I didn't actually drown - my next memory is puking out water on the concrete. Eleven years old and I had had my first taste of mortality that I could attribute to another human being rather than my body failing me.
If I'm a patchwork of everyone I've ever loved, quite a lot of me must be other people because I have loved many in my life. My first romantic love was, like most first loves, unrequited, leading to my first heartbreak. She had been my best friend, so it was something between a friendship ending and a breakup. I mourned. Thirteen years old, of course I thought my life was over. At fourteen I had my first and only romantic relationship where emotions existed on both sides - that was when I had my first kiss. I was told I was a terrible French kisser. He had had an abusive homelife and I hadn't learned exactly how the cycle of abuse worked since Grace hadn't been abused herself, so I pitied him without realizing he had been mistreating me until after he had decided we were done. That was three months of my life, the only experience I bring regarding loving someone in that specific silk patch.
Then again, if I'm a patchwork of everyone I've ever loved, is love the thread? Does love hold me together? I would prefer to believe something stronger was what sewed me up, maybe passion or curiosity, something I could attribute to myself alone, but no man is an island. I guess this is a snapshot of what that quilt would look like.
The echo maker
Caverns carry the sounds of wingbeats. Bats hang on the underside of the cave, mating and roosting, slumbering during the daytime. Beneath them, other cave fauna make their home in the guano. Then, when nightfall arrives, the wingbeats echo off the cavern’s edges as hundreds of hungry hunters fly off in search of sustenance.
There are few who willingly enter caves - few human beings, that is. Echoes make us doubt ourselves, feel self conscious of the footsteps that would, on other surfaces, be silent. But some people study the creatures of the caves, the beings that live within. Some people study echoes themselves; the physics of sound, how it bounces off objects.
There’s a connection between echoes and water - most creatures that use echolocation are aquatic, as electricity travels more easily in water. Fish have an electric sense to make the most of that reality. Mammals that echolocate are usually ones that returned to the sea, cetaceans communicating across oceans. But even on land, caves were formed by water, ancient water. There, too, mammals, the only ones capable of flying, use echoes to make their sense of the environment.
The echo maker, human ecologist, visitor to this world of echoes, entered the habitat, the cavern. So many creatures could be crushed beneath the feet that make those echoing footsteps, no matter how carefully said human points their lamp and watches where their feet land. So many small beings underfoot - centipedes, spiders, beetles; guano is quite a foundation for an ecosystem to be built on.
Certain species can only be found in specific caverns, and the unwelcome human has to be the one to record said species’ existence, count their numbers if possible, try to kill minimally in spite of humanity’s footprint on the planet crushing far less isolated ecosystems than these.
Maybe the creatures prefer not to be recorded or counted, to live unnoticed in the caverns, echo makers but without anyone but other echo makers to hear said echoes. Maybe the human would perish, unpreserved except in skeletal remains. The feat of removing a human in a cave is far more difficult than the feat of recycling beings with exoskeletons. Maybe all that will remain are echoes of a maker, of a person attempting to make a hidden world slightly less hidden.
use your limbs, try to suck the stickiness out of existence
Being stuck is the natural state of spirits. Being caught in a web, or tangled while attempting to spin one, nothing could be more natural in the world than stickiness. Limbo, limb, a limb is a limb, like a leg or claw or branch reaching towards the light. A spirit stuck in limbo is like a limb stuck in a spider's web, trying to free itself.
Human limbs free themselves easily from spider webs - they barely even feel the silk that took such effort to spin into shapes. But smaller limbs, like the skeletal delicate legs of an ant, they remain stuck until the spirit leaves them, the spider sucks them dry.
The world can suck a human spirit dry; and usually the ones doing said sucking aren't attempting to gain sustenance the way a spider is. The other humans can keep a spirit stuck in limbo for days, weeks, months, waiting to hear back, to obtain the currency that keep people able to obtain food in ways less visceral and traumatizing than how spiders obtain their food.
A spirit stuck in limbo is waiting, the way a worm waits on the sidewalk as it dries in the sun, having left the dirt during a rainstorm. A human spirit left waiting has an advantage to that worm - it knows what concrete is, what the sun will do if the spirit fails to move. Being stuck isn't always a choice, but one has choices to make while waiting, while stuck, while unsure and insecure of their place in the world of people. Stay in the shade, nurture limbo the way the sun nurtures limbs, branches of a tree reaching towards it - there are free resources for spirits stuck if one knows where to look. Libraries are brilliant ways to keep one's mind intact while waiting for a more fulfilling pastime. Prose, writing, that's how this spirit keeps afloat while in limbo.