decorative · endless · 1·9
one strand, no end. you cannot find where it starts. you cannot pull it apart without cutting the cord, and people who have cut it tell me the cut does not help. you wear it, or you set it down somewhere you can see; you do not undo it.
it sits on the back of the door, woven in a half-yard of dark cord, like a paragraph nobody is asking you to finish. it has been there since the autumn after. when visitors ask, you point — that — and they nod.
i did not invent the knot. someone older did, in a country i never went to. but the hands i learned it from were my mother's, and she learned it the year of the bad winter, and that is the year it is from, for us. it has been other peoples' bad winters since.
— a knot can hold a thing the room cannot put away.
true-lover's · keepsake · wreathus · memory · vigil