My mother unravels her ball of yarn.
Her fingers; wrinkled and sallow
tug between the threads of negativity
until she finds a strand thick enough
to weave me into.
She is familiar with how it feels to hold me,
so it takes mere seconds.
And she begins to knit.
A web of negative thoughts,
spiralled patterns of negative action.
I'm trapped behind a blanket of unpleasantries that you knitted for me
and it's heavy
and it hurts to hold
and it's beginning to suffocate.
Who'd have known it would be my mother's own handiwork
that collapsed my lungs.
Her craft knots itself around me
and I'm shackled.
The heart she gave me begins to slow.
The organs she grew for me are failing.
The breaths that she waited nine months for are weakening.
I shrivel, like a newborn again.
Like HER newborn again.
Maybe, like this, she will want me once more.