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Rachel Welcher

Unraveling



Unraveling


You lost your father too young, now, every relationship feels like an eventual unraveling. Don’t hold on too tight. Not to anything or anyone, or you might get caught in the tangle of something that won’t last. Your father started dating too soon, making you wonder if he really loved your mother. Now, you don’t believe a single word your boyfriend says, even when he writes it with pen, on paper, and slips it under your door, the way you always dreamed someone would. You mother used to worry that you would fall from the trees you loved to climb. Now you don’t climb trees anymore, but that might just be because you are older now, and adult life doesn’t make space for climbing trees. Your father hated cinnamon. You pour it over every dish. He loved his old, retro sneakers and wore them until they went from white to gray, from bouncy to thinning rubber. Now you walk barefoot. But these silent protests don’t quell the missing. The unraveling. The running out of yarn and angry poems for your moleskin journal. The one he bought you that time, at Barnes & Noble, when the two of you went out for coffee just because. Just because it is good to enjoy simple rituals together. Where are you, God, when everything is unraveling? Do you see past our busy nothings? Do you hear beyond our numb, prayerless scrolling to the moans of grief, deep in our gut? And do you notice the way we blame others, so that we are never forced to look down at our own empty hands?




Cover image by David Clode.

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