the_red_thread tender square i’ve been trying to tell this story in so many ways and for so long now that i never quite know where to start. in the beginning, i was married. in the beginning, i answered an ad to form a band with someone i had never met. in the beginning, i thought my bandmate and i were just friends. a few weeks after started this band, i took a walk around my neighborhood, alone, while my husband stayed back home and napped. i just started wandering with no destination in mind, just being with my thoughts. a voice from somewhere within me told me i was going to be divorced that year. i tried to argue with the voice. how could this be possible? what a ridiculous notion! i was happy in my marriage! but the more i tried to plead my case, the more the voice insisted i was wrong. after a half hour of this back and forth, i decided i wasn’t getting anywhere, so i changed tactics. instead of resisting, i decided to hear what the voice had to say, tried to picture what my life would be like as a divorced woman, something i never thought i’d have to consider before. i wondered if all this had to do with my new bandmate. the voice told me yes, but couldn’t say why. either he was opening me up to a new side in my creative life that i worried would change me, or he and i were supposed to be together. i continued to walk around the neighborhood dazed by this information, unsure of what the hell i was supposed to do next. i spent a lot of time in the months after meditating on my heart chakra and my heart became a lake; i could feel ripples of current pushing out and coming in with every breath. it was an extraordinary and expansive feeling i’d never had before. one day, during rehearsal, my bandmate and i launched into the creation of a new song. he was seated directly across from me and played these fat chords that were wide, and open, and dark. i came in to support the progression with the bass drum and the floor tom, wanting a murky sound to match him. we kept looping through bars of the same pattern over and over and i closed my eyes while i drummed. that’s when i saw and felt a thick red cord move from my heart to his. startled, i opened my eyes, thinking i had hallucinated it, but i could still see the cord. i messed up the timing of my playing, the spell broke and the cord disappeared. for days after, i couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. i tried to scour my mind for what i knew of red threads—could it be a stand-in for something? the only thing i could come up with at the time was an album i knew by arab strap with that name. when i began to google “red thread,” the system autocompleted the entry to “red thread of fate.” in chinese mythology, it is commonly believed that an invisible red cord exists around the finger of those that are destined to meet one another and fall in love. “the two people connected by the thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. this magical cord may stretch or tangle but it will never break” (wikipedia). i convinced myself that maybe i was looking for things that i wanted to see because i was attracted to my bandmate. part of me believed, or wanted to believe, it could be true, but the other part of me was skeptical. a week or so later, i decided to pay a visit to a psychic for the first time. i didn’t tell her anything about what i was going through, i wanted to see if she could give me more perspective on what i was experiencing. at one point during the reading, she invited me to pose a question. “what does the red thread mean?” i asked. she said that red is a color that is often associated with passion, which got me musing about creativity, and the new songs my bandmate and i were bringing into being, the excitement that we brought to our project. “spirit says that it is safe for you to get wrapped up in this thread, it will sew up your life’s seams, it will help lead you towards all you want to accomplish.” i started to cry. i told her about my vision, told her about what i’d found on the red string of fate. her response to me was, “see, you’re intuitive too.” two months later, my bandmate and i acknowledged that we were in love with one another. i told my husband i was leaving and in the weeks that followed i moved in to a new place with my bandmate. mr. tender square and i have been together ever since. 210831 ... tender square about a week ago, when reading johnson’s “inner work” i came across a passage i can’t find now that said something to the effect that jung believed each individual experienced motifs with their dream symbols. i was chewing on this for a while, trying to determine if i could remember any recurring symbols in my dreams over the course of my life but i couldn’t locate anything. after reading raze’s lampyridae i wondered what my earliest dream was that made a deep impression on me. when i was 13, i had this dream that i was swimming in a body of water towards an island. there were girls in front of me, friends of mine, and we were all spaced out as though we were links in a chain as we swam. i was not at the back of the line, but second from the back. i don’t know how i knew this, but when i woke up from this dream, i was certain it was about getting my first period. all the girls ahead of me in the dream—stephanie, sarah, meghan, andrea, erica—had already started their cycles. only me and the girl who swam behind me, kim, had not yet begun menstruating in our friend group. a week after this dream, when i went to the bathroom as i was being homeschooled (the district was on strike at that time, thankfully), i noticed dried threads of blood in my underwear. this memory got me thinking about the red thread as my potential motif, though i couldn’t locate any other instances besides these two that i’ve written about. and i went about my day being excited by the possibility that this symbol would come into my life again at an important moment. and then it hit me: it’s already here. i’ve been brought to the world of blather red, i am starting threads on these ox-blood pages; i am connected to the contributors of years past each time i revive a forgotten thread, and connected to you all in the new threads that are composed each day. it’s blowing my fucking mind. 210901 ... tender_square there is a wonderful german saying: ‘begin to weave, and god will give the thread,’ she said. don’t wait until the thread is attached, she hastened. because when i see you, i’m seeing the three fates, and i’m seeing you with a skein of red. you can *choose* who you offer that thread to, someone you should be tied with. and it isn’t always romance. you have to weave those people together but not make the knots so tight that people can’t leave; they have to be slipknots. you were shown that red thread, she explained, because you offer it as well as you feel it. people are either with you or they’re not, she warned. and they need to make a decision. the slipknot means that they acknowledge the bond, they acknowledge the path you’ll be walking together. 211210 ... e_o_i (I've read each entry and admired them, how they draw disparate things together. Now the title sparks a memory. But I don't want to intrude, because this thread seems particularly yours, so I've spun a spin-off web at bind_us_together.) 211210 what's it to you? who go blather from