Braid

Shoulders knobbed against a slat-backed chair, the temples tugged, a pull at the nape, you felt the up- sweep as she smoothed the fine wisps back and tucked yank into yank and a third into that until the consecutive dodges of thumbs and first fingers gathered, fraying and filing to their end—ended in an ornament that, suspended, looked ridiculous, even on a child who mostly set forth with what was called a “finished” look, some loose ends in order where others were not and a slight weight below the nape’s pull. The view others had of it was invisible to you. It made something there where there would have been a blank—now instead a kind of face sent from woman to woman like a duty, an obstinate duty to pattern. It’s too simple to see one thing rather than another, a wish protruding once it’s been suppressed, a vise that holds a thought in its proper place until it bobs to the surface of a generally balmy sea. Women and woman only a letter away—a strand gets mixed, then mixed right out of the heaven of perfect fit; one kind of accident turns into another. The whole head throbs for days. Black and white are woven into gray the way hyperbole has no chance once it’s juxtaposed to reason—negation just a thread among the available options and hope itself apparent there in the very notion a made thing can last. Tougher, coarser, split weave in the years. Shorter, longer, shorter, the brain bound to its anchor. The brushed-out waves with their rick-rack shadows, a thread inside the case, the case inside the locket, the locket beneath the yoke. All the effort to save in itself a form of loss. You can tell a story many ways. You can leave something out or put something in; you can fool yourself and hide. You can shake out the form or try to manage every wisp, but the latter will only bring you pain. You went under the hand and eye of another and the tether cannot be undone.