I am not a very patient person, but I try to practice all the time. I’m a writer, impatient either with how slowly the arguments and images come to me or at slow fingers that can’t type fast enough to catch them all. I’m a knitter and textile artist, stacking diminutive stitches one atop the other until a mitten or an embroidered leaf takes shape between my hands.
These are practices that let me play with time—sift it through my fingers, give it shape and dimension. This is the sweater I made my last semester of grad school, these my thoughts at a particular moment of my life, frozen in the shape of an essay. I can track my history in these ways. It’s both a little comforting and a little strange to have these bits of my history scattered around. Every time I wear a sweater I’m brought back to its creation. As a writer who publishes, I’m sometimes called to account for whatever inaccessible version of myself wrote an essay or a line however many months or years ago. At the same time, I have a published archive of myself, can chart my changing interests and ambitions through scattered ephemera.
This fall in Chicago, it has felt like time is running out, like the horizon of history is catching up to all of us. Federal agents have roamed the streets, pepper spraying protesters, kidnapping people based on their appearance. Families and neighborhoods have been terrorized. Every part of the city has felt like it might be the next to host some kind of violence; the daily news has been full of people being thrown and tackled and punched by heavily armed government officials. Meanwhile, time goes on, escapes, drains down my phone screen.
