I want to wear a gorgeous tie on special occasions, but they are in my closet without a warrant. I keep returning to the same doorway, the same small moment where your leaving first happened, as if the mind believes repetition might soften the blow. When you chose to leave, abandonment was not a concept but a physical sensation, an immediate hollowing, like the body suddenly realizing it has misplaced an essential organ. I did not argue with it, but I did recognized it. My nervous system knew the shape of that feeling before my thoughts could catch up. I stood there and watched love convert itself into absence.

I performed grief the way people do when they know the steps by heart. I cried in predictable places. I told the same story in different times, each to myself, and I was sanding it down each time so it sounded survivable. I slept too much, then not at all. I waited for mornings to feel redemptive, for nights to feel instructive. None of it surprised me. What surprised me was how abandonment returned. Not as a memory, but as a loop. Each day it arrives fresh, as if it has learned how to disguise itself as routine.

My daily life now feels like a series of motions without gravity. I wake up, make coffee, answer messages, read words that do not lodge themselves anywhere permanent. I move my body through rooms that do not ask anything of me. Nothing is technically wrong, and yet meaning refuses to attach. The hours slide past like water over smooth stone. I am not in pain every moment, but I am constantly aware of what is missing, the way the tongue keeps finding the empty space where a tooth once lived.

I think about the silkworm, how it creates something exquisite out of its own laboring body. How it secretes a filament so fine and patient that it becomes silk. Soft, luminous, impossibly strong for how delicate it feels. I imagine holding that fabric between my fingers, the way it responds to touch, how it seems to remember the warmth of skin. Silk is made through repetition too, through looping and looping until something coherent forms. The worm does not rush. It gives itself entirely to the process.

I envy that certainty. I envy the knowledge that what you are producing will eventually be beautiful, useful, desired. My hands ache with the memory of what love felt like—how it softened me without weakening me, how it made the world feel briefly legible. I want my hands on that again, not as an idea or a lesson, but as a texture. I want to feel love the way silk feels: cool at first, then warming, yielding without disappearing.

The silkworm begins without knowing what it is making. It eats and eats, obedient to a hunger it does not question, until its body learns a single, miraculous task: to give itself over to a thread. From its own mouth it releases a filament so thin it is almost nothing, and yet it does not break. It loops this thread around itself again and again, patient, rhythmic, instinctual. What looks like confinement is actually devotion. What looks like repetition is creation.

Inside that small, dim architecture, the worm is not thinking about luxury or desire. It is not imagining dresses, hands brushing fabric, light sliding across a sleeve. It is simply doing what it must: spinning, enclosing, trusting the motion. Its body becomes labor, which becomes texture. Its texture becomes something the world will later call beautiful.

Silk carries the memory of that persistence. It feels cool, then warm. It yields without surrendering. It looks fragile but resists tearing. People want it because it remembers the body that shapes it. Softness born from effort, elegance born from endurance.

The silkworm does not survive the transformation, but the thread does. It moves outward, touching strangers, resting on skin, becoming a symbol of desire. All that wanting begins in silence, with a creature small enough to fit in a palm, believing—without language—that what it is making matters.

The abandoning did not destroy my capacity to love, but it interrupted my faith in its timing. I am still here, looping, grieving, trying to thread meaning from my own unraveling. Maybe this is part of the making. Maybe this ache is a filament too. I keep my hands open, even when they are empty, quietly and painfully trusting that something tender is still forming.