Figure this out. Execute the plan
.
I finished the quiche with a smile on my face. Not one crumb cluttered the television top.
It takes a long time to knit a full-size blanket. It takes even longer to unravel. Somehow I knew this innately, and so I wantedto get started immediately. I waited until my jailer came for my breakfast tray and went through the whole bathroom routine. When that ordeal was complete, he left, and I thought I had three-and-a-half hours until lunch in which to un-knit and un-purl. I removed the bucket handle and began the de-knotting.
The air that morning had a yellowy tinge, the melancholic glow that both deflates and sedates you. The sun was an even overcast, which tricked the mind to think the day held no surprise, the blah, the drag-down type of day with no promise. I was wrong about this too.
I fought with a stubborn corner knot by jamming the bucket handle into its core and widening the gaps between strands of yarn, first with my pinky nail, then my whole pinky, and then ferreted the jumble out into a kinked, five-inch entrail. This took one hour, five minutes, and three seconds. At this rate, my projected timeline was already delayed. But before re-casting the completion projection, I figured I would collect de-knotting times over the course of the day to calculate an average. With one of the pencils from the two-horse, pink case, I plotted the first metric in a bar chart I designed.
With the chart started, I began the first row’s deconstruction.
La Boheme
serenaded me from Asset #16, the yard-sale radio. Naturally, I chose the classical station: I needed passionate upheaval and eternal, unrequited longing—the kind of emotion you’d die trying to quell—as my motivation. Bubblegum pop-songs might have cost me the extra edge I required. Of course, the hard-core rap of Dr. Dre and Sons of Kalal that I prefer today, seventeen years later, could have done the trick as well as any love-sick opera. Currently, as an adult, I crank gangsta rhymes during my daily Marine-level boot-camp workouts, especially when the retired sergeant I hired barks in my face that I’m “slime.” But the grinding tunes work, because after a fifteen-mile sprint and on my nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth stomach crunch, Sarge is hiding a reluctant smirk of pride from me. No one is ever going to take me again.
Sometimes I like to spit a wad of blood at ol’ Sarge’s feet. It is done with the utmost of respect, like a cat delivering a decapitated mouse on his owner’s porch. Meow.
But enough with the present. Back to the past.
As Hour 2 set in on Day 20, a black butterfly slapped against the high triangular window and pasted itself in place, wings spread. Was he warning me?
Are you warning me about something?
The universe holds many unsolved secrets and invisible connections. So perhaps he was indeed warning me.
I studied him whole, placing my red dismantling on the bed and tip-toeing toward the window for closer inspection. But because he was so high, the best viewpoint was from about mid-room.
Are you visiting me? Sweet angel, fly to them, tell them I’m here
.
I slid closer, rubbing my belly, my baby, and stood beneath the window, leaning my face in until my cheek was flush against the wall. Due to my growing girth, I had to bend. With eyes closed, I tried to feel whatever vibration the butterfly’s heart sent from above.
Is this loneliness? Am I lonely? Please shake this wall with your wings, tell me you hear me, black beauty, black friend. Please anything. Tell me anything. Save me. Help me. Shake this wall
.
Since I allowed the emotion in, I began to sob. I thought of my mother. I thought of my father. I thought of my boyfriend, the baby’s father. What I would have given to have the touch of any one of their hands on my back or the brush of any one of their lips on my cheek.
But this wallow into deep sadness didn’t last long. As though I had come to a right angle in the road, at the very height of
.
I finished the quiche with a smile on my face. Not one crumb cluttered the television top.
It takes a long time to knit a full-size blanket. It takes even longer to unravel. Somehow I knew this innately, and so I wantedto get started immediately. I waited until my jailer came for my breakfast tray and went through the whole bathroom routine. When that ordeal was complete, he left, and I thought I had three-and-a-half hours until lunch in which to un-knit and un-purl. I removed the bucket handle and began the de-knotting.
The air that morning had a yellowy tinge, the melancholic glow that both deflates and sedates you. The sun was an even overcast, which tricked the mind to think the day held no surprise, the blah, the drag-down type of day with no promise. I was wrong about this too.
I fought with a stubborn corner knot by jamming the bucket handle into its core and widening the gaps between strands of yarn, first with my pinky nail, then my whole pinky, and then ferreted the jumble out into a kinked, five-inch entrail. This took one hour, five minutes, and three seconds. At this rate, my projected timeline was already delayed. But before re-casting the completion projection, I figured I would collect de-knotting times over the course of the day to calculate an average. With one of the pencils from the two-horse, pink case, I plotted the first metric in a bar chart I designed.
With the chart started, I began the first row’s deconstruction.
La Boheme
serenaded me from Asset #16, the yard-sale radio. Naturally, I chose the classical station: I needed passionate upheaval and eternal, unrequited longing—the kind of emotion you’d die trying to quell—as my motivation. Bubblegum pop-songs might have cost me the extra edge I required. Of course, the hard-core rap of Dr. Dre and Sons of Kalal that I prefer today, seventeen years later, could have done the trick as well as any love-sick opera. Currently, as an adult, I crank gangsta rhymes during my daily Marine-level boot-camp workouts, especially when the retired sergeant I hired barks in my face that I’m “slime.” But the grinding tunes work, because after a fifteen-mile sprint and on my nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth stomach crunch, Sarge is hiding a reluctant smirk of pride from me. No one is ever going to take me again.
Sometimes I like to spit a wad of blood at ol’ Sarge’s feet. It is done with the utmost of respect, like a cat delivering a decapitated mouse on his owner’s porch. Meow.
But enough with the present. Back to the past.
As Hour 2 set in on Day 20, a black butterfly slapped against the high triangular window and pasted itself in place, wings spread. Was he warning me?
Are you warning me about something?
The universe holds many unsolved secrets and invisible connections. So perhaps he was indeed warning me.
I studied him whole, placing my red dismantling on the bed and tip-toeing toward the window for closer inspection. But because he was so high, the best viewpoint was from about mid-room.
Are you visiting me? Sweet angel, fly to them, tell them I’m here
.
I slid closer, rubbing my belly, my baby, and stood beneath the window, leaning my face in until my cheek was flush against the wall. Due to my growing girth, I had to bend. With eyes closed, I tried to feel whatever vibration the butterfly’s heart sent from above.
Is this loneliness? Am I lonely? Please shake this wall with your wings, tell me you hear me, black beauty, black friend. Please anything. Tell me anything. Save me. Help me. Shake this wall
.
Since I allowed the emotion in, I began to sob. I thought of my mother. I thought of my father. I thought of my boyfriend, the baby’s father. What I would have given to have the touch of any one of their hands on my back or the brush of any one of their lips on my cheek.
But this wallow into deep sadness didn’t last long. As though I had come to a right angle in the road, at the very height of
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