The Unraveling

Ann Weil

after “What We Don’t Say” by Joan Kwon Glass 

I’ve worn the sweater—my novice attempt at knitting 

beyond the obligatory scarf—for some 17 years, 

its once cream color now closer to weak tea. 

This morning, I noticed an unraveling at one cuff, 

and instead of repairing, I pulled.

“What are you doing?” my husband asks, watching 

with alarm from across the kitchen, as the yarn 

mud puddles at my feet. “Letting go,” I said, the puddle 

becoming a dirty snowbank. “Maybe I can reuse the yarn—

make something new.”

What I don’t say to him, but I can say to you,

is that I am choosing to pull on the loose ends

of our marriage. I have nothing left with which to mend 

its holes and threadbare spots. Stretched too far, 

its seams cannot hold us together.

You think I’m ice, don’t you? I deny it. I still feel

the warmth of his arms, the heat between us 

that made three new lives, the burning gut that knows

the pain of shared complicity. Love can melt 

even as our fingers grasp for it.

Tomorrow, I will tell him. Today, I sit cross-legged 

on the floor, find a tail end of the snowbank. Wrap 

its coldness across my palm, wind it into a ball. Make 

another and another until I have a pile of snowballs, 

ready for the fight that is already over.