in_the_blue | December 3

scribble_myname asked for more about fate and/or Tom's sister in Open Door, which was the working title for something I wrote a couple years ago that ended up being called Drowning Again.

Where do you go when you're nothing but a little thread? A nice pale lavender thread, no more than three inches in length, in this case? Easily unnoticed, especially by whichever of the three old hags turns your way at any given moment. You can hide behind the loud scarlets and magentas, bury yourself in a dust bunny, integrate yourself into any sunrise or sunset near the tapestry. It's a beautiful thing, especially when the will to survive -- no, to thrive -- is so very strong.

If you hadn't been snipped when you were just getting into the groove of surviving, you'd have been blended in with the buttercup yellow that is your mother, the midnight blue of your father, and the teal you now know as your brother. It's a good combination, those colors, and you think you complement the other three very nicely. That's why you're stubborn. That's why you refuse to be relegated to the dust bin of time. That's why you scurry to hide yourself away whenever Clotho or Lachesis or Atropos draws near.

You know Lachesis made a mistake when she measured you. You have no great affection for her because of that. Clotho is simply the weaver; you don't hold any particular enmity toward her. She just does her job. Atropos, though: the moment she snipped you out of the tapestry of life, you wanted to wrap yourself around her neck three times and tie yourself so tightly that she would never be able to cut another thread, ever. You couldn't, though, because you weren't long enough to surround anything but one of her ragged wrinkled fingers... and for that, you fault Lachesis. And so goes the circle of blame.

You know from casual observation that your mother would tell you to let go of blame, that it serves no long-term purpose. You cannot help yourself, though: you had the briefest taste of what life might have been, secluded away in your mother's buttercup yellow womb, listening to the soothing sounds of her voice and of your father's voice, sleeping to the lull of her heartbeat, immersing in the rush of blood and the sustenance and warmth of the fluid around you. Even though you were only an embryo, you had a soul and that soul is energy and energy never disappears. It only changes form. So you went from thread to embryo then back to thread, but it was the pull of your mother's heart that refused to let you go. She never forgot you. She never gave up on you. Even after your brother was born, the way she tugged at your psyche was so impossibly strong that you couldn't go away and couldn't rest. You couldn't be forgotten.

Time passed, but you were always in her buttercup yellow heart. Then she shared you with your brother and he had the brilliant idea of planting a passion fruit vine for you and that, as the saying goes, is that. Your brother could explain in clear science both the differences and similarities between human and plant tissue, but all you needed to know was that both things grow and both things thrive, particularly in the garden that is your mother's undying love.

It's so good to be alive. You might take on a slightly different form, but energy is energy and here you are, and your thread might be buried away and forgotten in the tapestry workshop of the fates, but not here. You're not forgotten or shunted aside here. You allow yourself one mundane observation, though: chocolate ice cream has got to be the best thing in the universe.

Right after family.