The Things We Mend

Lauren Cutrone, Butler College

Honorable Mention

2020-2021 Staff Essay Contest

There’s a simplicity to the notions within a sewing kit. As complex as the needlework may seem and as stunning as the project may ultimately become, there isn’t much to it. A needle, some thread, a few yards of fabric, perhaps a thimble, and you’re good to go. From the time I was a small child, rummaging through my Roman grandmother’s sewing kit in our home in Jamaica Estates, something about the basic sewing kit fascinated me. Especially now in an age of complexity where stimulation is constant and our phones are weighed down with countless apps, the soft and uncomplicated nature of sewing appealed to me.

I had just started searching for potential sewing classes to finally master the craft when the word “COVID” entered my vocabulary. The conversations and the precautions slowly inched into our lives until everything we did came with the consideration of a worldwide pandemic first. Suddenly, we weren’t discussing the latest movies or the books sitting on our bedside tables. Our conversations instead revolved around how many layers our cloth masks should be and where to acquire any brand of hand sanitizer.

When I was sent home from my office on March 13th, I imagined that we’d be back in a couple of weeks. We’d laugh about it, I thought. “Wasn’t that strange?” we’d say. “Glad that’s over!” But months later, the anticipation of returning to a state of normalcy faded away into a realization that this was our new normal. And with no precedent for how to navigate this unreal situation, we were left to fend for ourselves.

Quarantine, which had become the #1 word on everyone’s lips, carried its own quietness when it arrived. But unlike sewing, where the quiet is soft and meditative, akin to the feeling of breathing in and out, the quiet of stay-at-home orders seemed increasingly deafening. The freedom of it all wore off as quickly as it had appeared. There are only so many times one can pace back and forth in a home. An exciting and promising Netflix queue soon becomes repetitive. The comfort of working at home in cheetah print pajama bottoms soon loses its appeal. I began to feel claustrophobic. The things that were peacefully quiet—sewing, meditating, nature walks, even reading for pleasure—were tossed aside for their noisier and less productive cousins.

For the first time in my life, I feared silence and depended upon the roar of something, whatever that something happened to be that day. My day held stimulation back-to-back-to-back: podcasts, Zoom calls, Netflix marathons, Spotify playlists. I pushed falling asleep later and later into the early hours of the morning to avoid that space of time after the lights went out and before sleep took over. Silence meant having to think. And having the time to think brought with it a certain irritating and scratchy paranoia. What if I wasn’t doing enough with my time in quarantine? What if I was letting my coworkers down? What if I wasn’t there enough for my family or my friends? What if I wasn’t enough at all?

And so, these thoughts began to swallow me whole, scratching at my skin and tugging my hair, regardless of whatever background noise I had employed to keep the intrusive anxieties at bay. The littlest things, like children shrieking below my window or my roommate leaving a drawer open, fueled a rage within me. I felt unrecognizable. I woke up every day merely to wake up, forgetting entirely who I was, or how I once behaved, or why I did anything at all. And this carried on for nearly a year. I continued, zombielike, moving from bed to couch and back to bed. Rinse and repeat.

After 2020 finally ended and we became slowly aware that our new year would look similar to the previous one, I received a phone call. My best friend of 25 years, a thousand miles away in Florida, began the year of 2021 by unexpectedly losing her mother and her sister. “They’re gone,” she said, unable to bring herself to say the word we were both thinking. With no words to say and a million thoughts in our heads, we hung up after the shortest phone call we’d ever held and, again, the silence crept into my apartment, cold and aggressive and ironically loud.

The thing about sadness is that it isn’t as strong as your love for the people in your circle. Love outwits all, regardless of the pain you’ve been carrying. Quarantine robbed me of the most basic things that I had taken for granted. With a pandemic in place, I couldn’t run to my best friend as I would in a normal world. I couldn’t hug her. I couldn’t cook dinner for her. I couldn’t even attend the funeral and instead had to watch the ceremony virtually from my dining room table, alone and feeling heavy and numb.

But this new normal couldn’t steal everything from me. And with a new motivation, I picked up my needles again to sew. As metal hit the fabric, I thought of the person who would receive this project, as simple and modest as the piece was. I thought of her beautiful family, who had practically raised me from the time I was a chubby second-grader with glasses and a bowl haircut. I thought of my grandmother and her antique sewing kit that she had used to keep me warm and safe. I thought of all the women before me who picked up a needle and thread to outfit their families with delicate love and care. And as I sewed, I felt like I was stitching myself back together. I felt connected, even as I was approaching a full year without the touch of another human. With each tug and push of the needle, I felt that sense of calm return. Breathe in. Breathe out. You’re going to be okay.

We’re not out of it. We may not even be close to returning to what once felt normal. But when things are broken, we mend them. We’ll find ourselves back to what was familiar and safe. And stitch by stitch, we’ll get there.