Tessellating Rhomboids - in socks and in life

A previous post seems to have led some of you astray, leading you to think that I am generous and unselfish...
You would be sadly mistaken. While it is true that I sent off Wisp, I in turn picked up:
Socks for me! They are Cookie A's ubiquitous Monkeys in Lorna's Laces Amy's Vintage Office. They were a good pattern match for the stress in my life right now.

Just complicated enough to keep my brain from parsing information, not so complicated that I was obsessively hunched over a chart. They weren't gravity wells or even harder...The art of comfort.

I've had it hammered home the last few months that, while I've come a long way socially, there's ever so much more to learn.

So many of my friends are struggling right now. And somehow, I have become the receiver of their stories. But each story hurts me, makes me want to keep my own story quiet so that I don't hurt others. I find myself wallowing in a tub o'worries. I don't want to think, to think of the woman whose life is being erased by the tide of Alzheimer's. Or the short future of the young man with bone cancer and the long future of his wife who will be left behind. Or even of the gentle irony of a woman who carries her chemo pills in a tin stamped "Faith" when she hasn't any faith in the science.

I keep trying to reach through distances with mere words and fail. What good are words? They don't carry the warmth that even the briefest of touches conveys. They can't carry a burden or heat water for tea. Words aren't the sheen of a tear from a heart that hurts, or the whisper of a dimple in a compassionate smile.

At the same time, words are what I have to offer. They connect me to others over vast distances - not just geographical but more deeply than that, each part of the pattern interlocking to form a new design.

So I completed these socks in 5 weeks, because I could use them to unplug. I could take a break from the voices in my head. And in unplugging I found renewal, new words, new strength to go on listening. But I confess - I'd like all my friends problems to be solved - for selfish reasons.