Spinning Yarns

Spinning Yarns

Last night I had a dream.

You were in it.

Sometimes it seems you always have been, ever present in the corners or lurking in plain sight and whether meaning to or not, you almost always have my attention.

Creeping round the room like some exotic house spider from a different house. You spin webs from multicoloured yarn wherever you go, leaving traces, trails where you’ve been and all the dark crevices you’ve occupied… and still do. Bright threads amidst the shadows that used to suffice before you’re arrival.

The loom is spun, here… there!
You move round confident, cautious!
Seeming to dwell wherever I try to hide. There are times I have managed jar you up, both fascinated and terrified at the same time, and behind the glass you’re manageable, so long as we don’t touch, connect, because that would be… well, just what I want and for some reason that terrifies me even more than the alternative.

So instead I release you, but not outside because you’re a house spider, albeit from a different house, and that would kill you. So I release you in the spare bedroom where the coloured threads number the most, and each time I know that you will get out, because I want you... I want you to.

Once, on a dark confused night, you spun you’re most ambitious colourful web, an invitation, a snare. I panicked and ripped it down before you had finished and scurried away afraid of getting caught. Now I dream of what that vibrant loom would have looked like fully spun. But it seems you scurried away to.

Sometimes I think I still see you, I feel the chill and think it was maybe your ghost, perhaps you always have been. But if that is the case, then who has spun this crochet web around the shadows of my heart bringing both colour and warmth to the cold and dark? Why does something once so foreign to me actually feel like a bittersweet version of home? Bookmarks to chapters never read, a passport stamped for shores never reached.

But spiders are survivors, and survived you have, despite my best half-hearted efforts, even if your form is that of an eight legged phantom, both blessing and curse.

Sometimes when I’m feeling brave I tentatively reach out to the multicoloured webs contemplating how to pluck them, play them in such a way to bring you back, if you were even here in the first place.

I can see you now, even on waking, an image weaving light from shadows, tentatively stitching moments into grand quilts and tapestries.

I hope you are sharing them with someone, and I hope they realise how fortunate they are. I envy them their lack of fear; fear of not bringing enough to the table, fear of not being good enough to participate in the game, but mostly the fear of being consumed.

Consumption? Death? Such concepts are metaphorical phases in the narrative of life, it is how we weave these phases into the greater loom that creates the over arching web. One day I will learn, my only regret is that it won’t be with you… because those dreams?

The dreams in which I’m dying

… are the greatest dreams of all.