Have you ever made felt? It is the process of taking animal fibers like wool and agitating them diligently with a needle. You pull and disrupt and push the thread against its grain. This causes it to frizz, to fray, and to reach for itself. Enough hours of this and you find yourself with a paste-like fabric.
What we had was natural, loving from the start. I do not believe our origins were wrong, just got agitated for hours—years of the needling and examining if it were working right.
I love a thread art. How silk can slip over a hook, slip through your fingers, create something beautiful. But the thing about felt is, you can’t return it to thread. Once it has been prodded enough, it becomes something that can only be more of the same. No longer yarn but thick, murky, pain-ridden threads that have melded together in attempt to protect themselves.
I should not need to tell you that is what we’ve become. I don’t want to label your pain addiction—martyrdom. Don’t want to decide for you that you must always be the most unhealed in the room. But you seem to think pain is the only way to bond. Shared misery and enmeshment.
You demand to be felt.
Since we have been parted, I have found my own rhythm. Slow Tunisian knots over a wooden hook. My pace is slow. I open up to people slowly. I trust people slowly. Even when I trust someone fully, I do not use every moment to dig through trauma with them.
I did not know this about myself when we met. I had only ever known myself to be the clingy lover—the part of me so fearful of being abandoned that I insisted on getting reassurance in every moment. I became the self-adhesion of a restless thread. I thought I was a desperate gripping. I thought I was cycles of begging people to tell me they would not leave. I thought I was the addressing every issue at the moment of its inception. I thought I was this vigilance, this rule making and following. I am not.
I am not the part of me so afraid of abandonment that it does not feel safe talking about anything other than the relationship. I am not the part that feels I must curate and perfect myself in order to be loved. I am not the part that thinks vulnerability is a moral obligation and pathologizes my pace.
I am not that part, and I no longer act as if I am.
I don’t know what happened but my dominant experience of you has transitioned from being a safe space to be a space that demands I override my safety. It is cloudy and I am certainly in no position to see it clearly but this thing you say is you are is choking out some of your relationships, like balls of thread matted together and shoved down a throat.
Maybe that is for the best, maybe we are no longer for you. Maybe you are meant to find those just like you; those who love being in the depth and don’t need to come up for air. I wish you those spaces.
I am not that space.