Stitch Count

Lola could have easily worked in a munitions factory.

"I love the repetition, it's so peaceful," Lola said while we took a break from rolling napkins and polishing silverware. She leaned against the cold brick, blowing smoke into the night sky, grinning like a child while she stared at the moon.

She could make the dullest of task into a piece of art, her rings clinking against the metal every time she lifted a fork. She moved like a metronome equipped with a hidden switchblade ticking on the inside. Every task came with a rhythm, a lilting flow of mystic glitter in monochrome.

I think that's what drew me to fiber art years later. Not the peace. Not the softness of the yarn. It's all in the rhythm.

Yarn over. Pull. Turn.

Repeat.

I thought I had picked it up to settle my nerves. To stitch something whole out of a life that had frayed around the edges, full of holes and dropped loops. Something completely in my control in a world that kept dissolving around me. But I don't think that's true.

It feels like the projects pick me. The image pops into my head, and I can see every stitch, the texture, the drape. I'm nothing but a vessel to a lost wonder. Every time I pick up the ball of black yarn, she sits over my shoulder, whispering inspiration directly into my mind.

When I look at my art, I realize that she never left.

I didn't get to say goodbye.

When I went back to my nowhere town to pull my life back together, we lost contact. The next time I heard her beautiful name, it was in the past tense.

No obituary. No messages. Just the whispers from someone who knew someone.

"She's gone."

But that isn't right. She's still here.

~

Every time I work a row, she creeps in. The art summons her. Not in memory, though her memory is in every brushstroke and stitch. Not in grief, although the grief shines down in the beams of moonlight. She shows up in form.

I reach for a color, and come up with black.

Then white.

Then a gray that reminds me of her breath clinging to the car window as we head into the mountains.

Her palette. Her influence. Her design.

I made a wall hanging last fall without meaning to. It started as something flowing and graceful, but before long, it looked like one of her paintings. Sharp voids. Clusters of dots that look like the cells of her bloodstream under a microscope. It wasn't even my style.

I left it hanging off the arm of the couch.

In the morning, it was spread over the table.

Not dropped. Not crumpled.

Spread. Smoothed over with tattooed hands. Admired.

~

Then there's the music. The skipped songs to Bowie tracks that I had never queued. The static in my headphones when I find a pattern that she would have worn with joy. The faint scent of Belmont cigarettes and cloves when I open my yarn cupboard.

But nothing shakes me like the hair clip.

She had come up to me at work, sizing me up like her personal Barbie doll. She pulled the clip from her own hair, and turned me around. I'd always avoided letting anyone touch my hair. It was sacred to me. But her touch was as though it was my own. I trusted her. She moved with love as she twisted my hair up.

I tried to give it back at the end of the night. She smiled, said it felt like it belonged in my blonde locks.

Bronzed metal, embossed with tiny floral carvings. A dainty tool, but equipped with a hard edge. The tip curved in, bent with purpose; her favorite sniffer when we engaged with the Columbian gods of powder and excess. You don't bend metal like that without hunger. Without need. Without ritual.

So, I kept it. Still have it.

It's been in every bag I've carried since. Rolled into skeins, zipped into jacket pockets.

I don't usually wear it.

But I never leave it behind.

On a whim a few months ago, I twisted up my braid and grabbed the clip. I needed my hair off my neck while I worked on a long, flowing cardigan. And just like that... she spoke.

Not in words. But the project flowed like possession.

My hands moved as if they were gifted by a ghostly visit. I couldn't stop them if I wanted to. I didn't need a pattern. I didn't need to think. It felt like a megaphone wired directly to Lola's soul. Like she had something that she needed to tell me, but the only language we had left was fiber and color work.

Since then, I can't stop using it when it's time to create. I loop and twist it into my hair, clip it onto my working yarn, hook it onto the elastic on my wrist. Every time, it feels the same: a rush of urgency, clarity, intensity.

She wants to be seen.

Lola never begged for attention. She commanded it.

~

Lola wasn't glitter and fishnets. She wasn't neon and bubblegum pop.

She was black eyeliner like gunmetal. High collars. Oversized coats that made her look like she was gliding through the streets of downtown instead of walking. She made a black and white houndstooth scarf look like armor. She was angles and grace. She was unapologetically art.

Leaning against the brick, Lola looked like a sculpture pillaged from a modern art museum. Her energy was ecstatic.

She wasn't just cool. She was studied.

But her kindness was braided with chaos and overwhelming empathy. She would steal a bottle from behind the bar, but cradle a dying bird in her hands if it hit the window. She'd fix your eyeliner while telling you how she felt like she was dying from another blood infection. She was a beautiful creation with a heart covered in bite marks.

I think that's why she lives in the fiber of my yarn.

Because fiber may be fragile, but it holds.

Because art is structure, but it can be improvised.

Because some part of her still refuses to unravel.

I've stopped wondering if I'm imagining her. She's laughing in the projects that come out in her palette. Her force and intensity are holding my yarn tension as I work. She's the disorder when I'm tired of the same stitch.

She's the reason that unfinished projects always move to the moonbeams when I close my eyes to rest.

I once left out a black and white afghan on my blocking mats, pinned into shape as it dried. When I came in the next morning, it was looped into a bow.

Nobody had been home. Nobody had known I had pinned it.

But Lola would have loved it. She would have worn it with oversized jeans and combat boots. Would have called it a "fucking masterpiece."

~

I catch myself whispering while I work. Not like a prayer. More like... updates. Check ins.

"You would have rocked this piece."

"I saw a pattern that made me think of you."

"This is starting to look like one of your murals."

"I miss you, you ridiculous bitch."

~

I haven't cried over her in a few years. But every time I lay out a finished piece, I can feel when she's stopped in to see it. It's the ache behind my eyes, her hand on my shoulder while she runs her fingertips over the stitchwork.

Not grief, I don't think.

Just the pressure of a storm building behind my ribs.

She lives in my art now. Not in the past, or in soft memories of bar nights, bumps off a crocodile clip, and cigarette smoke.

Here.

In the art.

In every loop.

In the tension and the pull and the hum of sliding yarn.

So, I keep stitching. Not to remember her.

She is the art now. She's the pattern moving through my fingers.

When the yarn tightens, and the pattern begins to surface, and I pull my hair back with that little metal tooth of hers...

I can hear her again.

And my Gods, she's loud.