Red Thread

“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.”

Rochester to Jane, in Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

I have never read Jane Eyre, but my sister referenced this quote at our cousin‘s wedding. Somewhere along the way, my brain altered this idea and made it my own. My sternum is wrapped with a multitude of red thread. Each one connects me to one of my beloveds: family, friends, romantic partners. The threads have varying thickness, because each time I see and spend time with someone we stitch another layer of that cord. When I was first getting to know my now ex-poet, we had so many things in common, it almost felt as though the threads pre-existed our meeting one another, instead of being stitched by our interactions. I imagined them as spider silk gossamer: gold and shimmering. 

I do not feel, as Rochester did, that I shall bleed internally and die when the other

person is not present. Rather, the cord goes slack. Keeping them all taut is the challenge—and the joy—of polyamory. 

I have been trying to envision a way of illustrating my threads. In my mind’s eye: a delicate watercolor of a rib cage with blues and lavenders for the shadows on the bone. And at the sternum, literal thread sewn through the paper. I am stymied in creating my vision, a little by my own artistic limitations, and a lot by my current situation. My right arm, my dominant hand, has some sort of nerve impingement. To be frank, it hurts like a mother. But I don’t like not following through, and I told you I would post every Friday. And so I’m sharing these incomplete thoughts, and a few sketches from the sketchbook that were intended as studies for the painting I’ve described. With a little luck and speech-to-text technology, I’ll be back next Friday with an essay or a poem.