FRAMEWORK: KNIT, PURL

feeled notes in 1x1 rib stitch

KNIT: A sock in severe blue by my grandmother’s trembling hand at least ten years ago in perfect shape with perfect rows of even stitches. How did she do it.

PURL: Within the throes of unwellness I feel locked both inside and outside my body simultaneously, both severely limited by and infinitely open because of.

KNIT: In order, my three beloved ways to put two yarns together: looping, knotting, and complete enmeshment by stabbing.

PURL: I try my best to reel it in, my wild enthusiasm, which is perhaps what leads to my relative success in work but my frequent downfall in friendship building and maintenance.

KNIT: The complexity of ancient knit artefacts reveals that it is an art practiced for far longer than we know for. It should be then intuitive in some way, the dance of two needles rehearsed over centuries.

PURL: Controversial research suggests that we might, in fact, have it wrong: it’s not the connective tissue deterioration leading to abnormal mast cell behavior, but the other way around.

KNIT: It should feel intuitive but it does not when I first hold the same two needles my grandmother once used.

PURL: I forget the order in which days follow one another in a week. I misspell frequently and write incoherently. I miss deadlines and meetings. I am trying every day to mislead my clients into believing: This is not how I am usually.

KNIT: In the beginning I keep confusing tension with tenseness, pulling my stitches so tight that I can hardly unravel them.

PURL: There is a kind of loneliness I feel now that I have never felt before, a loneliness that comes with a sense of finality. I used to think all the time that everything can and will change.

KNIT: Eventually I learn my least favourite and most repeated lesson in life, to loosen my grip.

PURL: A wash of naivety runs through me, making me susceptible to betrayal. I cannot usually predict or detect malice or ill feelings, I cannot put my finger on them until months later.

KNIT: To knit a poem, to write a sweater, I am trying my best.

PURL: It has always been difficult for me to untangle myself from someone I love. Once upon a time I shared a life with a man who dragged me out of his house in the middle of the night and locked me out in the street.

KNIT: In a knit there is a right side and a wrong side but a skilled hand can make them equally neat, equally beautiful.

PURL: Today for the first time I felt anxious at the lake.

KNIT: My grandmother used to knit sweaters and hats for all the babies born in her neighborhood. My other grandmother used to knit winter clothing for every single one of her eleven siblings, starting from when she was seven years old.

PURL: The sensation of hunger is still new to me. The sensation of isolation even more so. What I am longing so deeply for is a friend who would love a thing I made them even if it was bad, love it so much they’d use it every day.

KNIT: There are so many ways to fuck up a stitch. Ideally in a piece there should be no errors whatsoever.

PURL: What I am longing so deeply for is not one such friend (of which I do have several, even some close enough to touch) but a group of them, a fabric of them, I don’t want to be alone when I fall.

KNIT: It was my father who first taught me how to thread a needle, how to make a simple stitch.

PURL: Again I am confronted with my least favourite lesson in life — without which I will never have what I want —

KNIT: To unravel a knit line by line is to “frog” it: Rip it, rip it.

PURL: I hold my beloved’s hand in the car, I call it my coucal, my most cherished bird of all.

KNIT: It is no surprise that loosening my grip lessens the pain, and yet —