What the Selvage Keeps From Fraying

A selvage is not sewn on afterward, the way a hem mends a raw edge once the weaving is already finished and already failing at its border. A selvage is woven in, from the first pass of the shuttle to the last — the warp threads doubling back on themselves so the whole cloth cannot unravel from the side inward. It looks, to an eye that doesn’t know cloth, like nothing at all. A plain double line, no color spent on it, no pattern. It is the least beautiful part of anything I make. It is also the only part without which nothing else I make would survive a single wearing.

P. says I have drawn a fence and called my side of it discretion and her side confession, as though one were craft and the other only weakness dressed poorly. She is not wrong that it is one fence. She is wrong that I built it to keep her out. I built it the way I build every selvage — to keep something from unraveling, and it has never once been clear to me, weaving it, whether the something is my customer’s trembling hand, or my own.

I have told her two things I have told no one else in this city. I did not call either of them nothing. I called them selvage — the plain, unlovely, structural edge that keeps a much larger cloth from coming apart at the very seam where it is handled most. She wants to know which it is, the keeping or the choosing who gets told. I have wound thread for nineteen years without once needing the two to be different.

I will not send this either. Some edges are only edges once both hands have let go of the cloth.