For me knitting is a way of finding order in the world. It helps me maintain control and focus my emotions and energy on something predictable, finite, and productive. If I do everything the way I’m supposed to, I can have the results I desire (or even better).

Each tiny little stitch harnesses my joys, anxieties, trepidations, and scattered thoughts, and when I look back at pieces I’ve knit, I am transported to the time in my life when I was making them. These loops and bumps record my experience, and they are invested with what I brought to them.

I have a project that I stopped in the middle of a row, and I’m reluctant to even pick it back up again because it was what I was working on last week when I realized my living arrangement (and as a consequence my relationship) wasn’t going to work out.

On Monday, my cat and I moved from Connecticut to my parents’ house in New Jersey. My boyfriend and I are taking a break after dating for four years and living together the last three. In my heart, I knew this time was coming, and I am sure it is the right thing to do, but it still really hurts.

This weekend will find my mother and I packing all my belongings (most still not unpacked from the last move) into a U-Haul, and it will be done. I have no idea what the future holds (apart from a wedding we’re going to the next weekend), and I have so much schoolwork and thesis stuff to catch up on that I don’t really have time to process my thoughts and feelings.

This may be overly personal to share on my knitting blog, but I felt like it would be dishonest to show photos of stitches and projects without giving the emotional context behind them. It happens that my commute will get even longer, so we’ll have lots of stitches to mull over in the coming weeks and months. And maybe somewhere in there, things will start to make sense again.