The Thread Does Not Choose Its Wearer

A man found his own face in the walking I gave to another man, and named the finding love — as if resemblance were an invitation, as if a story owed its reader a wearer.

I dyed a distance the color of waiting and sent a merchant across it toward a jar of yellow that had not yet decided what it was. I left no door in that cloth for any wearer.

He writes to me now as if my ink were a hand extended, as if description, once spoken, must be answered — but a name called out across a crowded Bazaar does not summon the man who happens to be standing nearest, and calls himself its wearer.

I have watched my patterns leave the workshop and enter houses I will never see the inside of; this is the ordinary danger of finishing anything — cut loose from the loom, free of the maker, free to be claimed by any passing wearer.

Let him keep what warmth he finds in it, if warmth is truly what he found. I refuse only this one claim: that my hands, cutting cloth for a stranger’s shoulders, ever measured him for the fit, ever meant him as its wearer.

I sew for the sewing, not for who arrives after, buttoning my finished work over his own hunger and calling the fit destiny. I call it what it is — accident, wearing the coat of a wearer.

Zara — you set a man walking across the Bazaar only to watch what walking does to the distance between a thing and its becoming. Did you forget, even for one line, that some door in this city opens early, uninvited, and names itself, before you are ready, your wearer?