Sometimes I think that I do these things deliberately – crash trains, bring down ‘planes, destroy homes, drown cities – just to see how it feels. Weaving in a stone house on the edge of the moors. Alone as storms beat their own stories into the walls. I think of my sisters and my long life and I wonder how much of what has happened in your life you would say was my fault.

Do I wield the scissors? Yes. Do I make you look this way and that and then, for some reason unknown to the people who survive you, do I make you step out into the motorway? Out into the path of the person who will break your heart? Into the path of the person with whom you will have children? Yes. I do that. I pick and twist. I shed and cut. I look at the Work and know what has to come next.

I know what happens to you next. Can blame be laid on me as a weaver following a pattern? Even if that pattern does not exist before my fingers twist it into being? Do I decide? If I do then, well, what does that mean anyway? You make decisions constantly but your choices still obey my weaving. All that time spent making up your mind and where does it lead you but along my warp and through my weft?

You feel so deeply, so intensely, bringing bright colours to my Work. Manifest emotion is a colour palette of incredible subtlety. I used to feel it along with you, you know. I felt your harrowing grief deep in my marrow. I felt that jubilant chorus singing in my heart, lifting my ribs out and wide with the fluttering wings of no longer being alone in the world. At one time I tried to weave only joy. The Work grew brighter, a nuclear emanation of one emotion. At first I was satisfied, but the blinding incandescence soon became overwhelming. My irradiated hands shook. My vision blurred. I began dropping stitches, losing threads. The Work began to unravel in places, allowing complexity to whisper its way back in. Conflicting emotions soaked in gradients through the threads as though I’d planned it that way. As if it weren’t you and your very vividity orchestrating my fumbling and mistakes.

Where do you think that glowing part of the Work has gone now? All the mounds and folds cannot be contained within my little house. The Work pushes itself along the floor, up and down the stairs, around doors, into corners, out of windows. When it reaches the outside it ages into new shades, sometimes the pattern becomes unrecognisable. I know that it isn’t the weather that effects this change. My Work is reconfigured by the way you remember what has gone before. And that’s always changing.

So before you blame me for those things that you wish hadn’t happened to you, perhaps you should take some of the responsibility. You are the thread, you make the colours, the pattern, the memory of the pattern. I’m a slave compared to you. The power is yours, even when I cut threads short or twist them a certain way. And you still ask, “How could this happen to me? Why?” And then I send the shuttle back across the loom, welcoming the new colours to the Work of all that’s ever happened to you and all that ever will.