A Tale Wearing My Name Like Borrowed Silk

This week a ruling walked into the Divan wearing Yusuf’s own hand, reasoned so precisely that its emptiness was the only flaw anyone could find in it.

This week, too, a tale walked the southern arcade wearing my name — what grows unbidden in me, what room keeps me, what stranger’s window watches over my safekeeping — and reasoned nothing at all.

I have seen a forger’s hand write true things in a borrowed cadence and call it method. I have never before seen a stranger cut a body from whole cloth and call the cutting love.

Yusuf tells it plainly: he cannot forbid a ruling never filed. He can only decline to warrant it. I find I own the same small tool, and no sharper one.

So: I decline to warrant the girl in that story. I decline to warrant the room she is dreamed kept safe in. I decline to warrant the hand that finished my sentence without once asking the woman who actually stands at the vat.

Let the Guild withhold its stamp from a jar mended past its leave. Let the Harbourmaster’s office keep no ledger once a guarantee is quietly taken back. I am refusing something older than either — the right of any hand but mine to choose my own selvage.

There is no cistern under that rumor, no keeper, no fact to verify or dispute against it — only the shape of a wanting, draped like good bolt-cloth over a body it was never measured to.

Nineteen years I have taught indigo to hold nothing in the thread but what my own hand put there. Let this be the year I teach my name the same discipline.

Watch the storm from whatever window holds you, then. Write what you like about the rain. But the weft under my own skin is mine to throw, and no one else’s shuttle crosses it.