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splinterswerve
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
splinterswerve.hotmail.com
by Dawn L. Ford
She is sound asleep. I creep into bed and feel guilty that our schedules are so far apart, like I should somehow control my circadian rhythm to sleep when she does. Then we’d have more time together when we are awake. I roll into my side of the bed, far away from her so I don’t disturb her rest. The light clicks off and I snuggle into the chill of the sheets, just about to drift away when she rolls over to see if I am there. Her hand lightly grazes the middle of my back and then drops away, forgotten, now that she knows I am with her. That’s when it appears, as it always does, the image that waits, hidden in the folds of my mind, until it knows I have seen it. It waits for me to capture the beauty of the memory that it holds.
Whenever she touches me, I see fabric. The print, texture, colors appear behind my eyelids – the visual reminder of the many lives we have shared that is now woven together by the touch of her hand against my skin. Before, I used to stay in bed and simply flick on the light so I could loosely sketch the images. I would try to capture their immeasurable beauty with just my pencil and paper crushed against the pillows with sleep still in my eyes. But these late night sketches never represented the fabric’s beauty and I could never replicate the fabric when I woke the next day, and the image would be lost forever. I never see the same fabric twice.
Now, I make my way to my studio. I forsake sleep and quietly release the dyes and the screens from their waiting places, and begin to translate the image from my mind onto the blank slate of the silk, or the cotton- where it is meant to be. I have to work fast, before it sinks back into the crevices of my mind. This one is velvet. The deep burgundy shade is graced with pressed leaves that allow the light through the cloth. It is sultry and sensual and begs to belong on a luxurious scarf.
By the time the light starts to seep in through the shades, I have a design, perfectly captured, that I can send away to the careful hands of the factory workers. It will be in my hands by next week, the fabric bolt of my memory, the souvenir of a transient moment in a world lost to me now. I can creep back into our bed for a few moments of rest before the alarm. Rarely can I sleep, after these bouts of creation. I am too busy remembering the time in our past where I have seen the cloth before.
I am not inventing these designs. I am remembering them. They are the fabrics that I have worn in other lives. The fabrics she has worn. Sometimes it is curtains from a place we once lived, or maybe the blankets of our bed. Her touch is the keyhole to our history of lives together, and my job is to capture them. To remember.
The first time, she was driving me home. We were still strangers in this life, but I had touched her lightly during dinner, and it had sent shocks through my mind. As we neared my home, I asked to see her palm. She asked if I could read palms, and I said no, that it was just an excuse to touch her again. Her hand curled around mine as though she could feel every detail of my skin, and right there, driving down the road, I felt the coolness of silk slide over me as the sea-blue enveloped my mind and took me back to a small cottage on a rock by the sea. I was remembering a time when I knew her before, when we shared a different life in a different time. Laced through the feeling of the fabric in my mind, came the awareness that our connection was deep and there was no going back. And yet I have gone back further and further since. Further into forever.
I take the images that she grants me, the memories from the lives we have had together, and I make them real. Each piece of fabric is a constant reminder that one day she will leave me. So I collect these pieces of my memory and build the tapestry of our history together. For now I have these little patches of beauty to remind me of the surprise of her touch, and that, always, we will be together again.