Em Buth | Issue 6, Spring 2025

I’ve been finding more embroidery cloth in the same antique mall every time I visit. Isn’t that funny? How something becomes easier to find once you are always searching for it? Now I know how they should look—tucked between piles of linens and smelling like mothballs and old lady perfume, sandwiched between two shinier looking things. Often they lay out floral scenes, or otherwise simple patchwork shapes. Sometimes they open up into forests. The tips of my fingers occasionally break out into hives from my embarrassing dust allergy, one or two red itchy burning welts, lit flame from the object and its memory. And still I take the embroidery artwork home, and I don’t wash it. 

But this is not why I am writing to you. 

I am writing to you to tell you that I slipped again the other day. Right after I took my testosterone shot. The needle plunged down and I was someplace else. 

And yes—the passage was a slipping. Well, maybe ‘slippage’ is a more apt word, to describe how it moved me like a needle through fabric. And I could see this somewhere through a tiny pinprick hole. 

I think you know what that feels like. 

Most importantly though, I am writing to tell you I miss you terribly, and that I want you to know about the slippage and how I am not sure what causes it. 

Of course it started a lot smaller. It was between blinking pauses, and in that between, I wasn’t. One of the first times I noticed it, I was at the grocery store. The lines were long and everyone was wrapped up in getting to the register. I asked the cashier if today was one of the store’s busiest days, but I heard the response come from my own mouth, and I could stare back at fidgeting hands from over the register screen. His thoughts were on a dog home alone and he had a hunger like mine. He was not impressed, and from his throat I said: 

“Monday and Sunday always are.” 

And when I was him, I saw his memories folded out like tendrils of embroidery thread, on a canvas that patches together, almost limitless. Every thought, a knot. All tied to each other. 

Which is to say, we were both very tired.

When you slipped, it was always into the things I never knew could have memories. Old fox furs, brass knobs, wedding gowns, broken cameras, memorabilia lunchboxes. You loved standing in the middle of Savers with a grin on your face, recounting to me how one teapot got all the way out here. When I would come home at night after work, and crawl under the bedsheets, I could feel from how your body tucked up that you had slipped into the scenic oil paintings and quilted landscapes that adorned your walls, places that neither of us had seen in person. Except for the lone lakeside cabin that sits framed on your nightstand. You know the one, we stayed in it for a long weekend many years before, and on many succeeding visits, as a corner of the world that felt uniquely for ourselves. Now it is caught in the shaky needlework I made for you one birthday, so you could still visit, while we were not there properly.

Disappearing acts aren’t so uncommon, but this is not disappearing. It is a removal, and a movement. We have both talked about how it feels to not be at home in this place. Because it is hard here, and evil sometimes too. Once, you told me we would’ve met anywhere and everywhere. And I agree. I was always meant to find you. 

I am looking for you now. 

Since the initial catalyst, I tried learning how to control it, but I’m not so sure that is entirely possible. More is lost when we bring in ideas of conquering a space, a body, a mind. But now I can’t even walk into the grocery store without moving from person to person to person, while my body drools over the vegetables. So I avoid it entirely. Where you embraced the things you could slip on and on to,I’ve learned to be afraid of. 

One time, as you traced my freckles as if they were constellations, we talked about memories that feel as if they are happening from above, in third person. This slippage feels more of the same. And sometimes I don’t remember myself, only everyone else. 

When I slip now, I am often in the pines. Just as I was when I was taking my testosterone shot. I became the moose whose head now hangs heavy and dusty in the cabin. I moved through his eyes. And while I was there, I saw you. You were walking through yellow trees and I could feel every lift-prick fall of leaves. We were in the leaving place, and your movement was beautiful. You looked up. 

And then I became the conversation of the trees in those woods, and their threads aren’t embroidery, but rather tangled delicate spider webs, all the more they held each other. They  

knew I was with them, transitioning through their language of interlocking movement. I followed you as you were walking, and as I looked for what you were heading towards, I came back to, sitting on my bed, with the needle remaining plunged. 

I told you that while taking my HRT shot, I must wait five seconds after injection before pulling out the needle. And so it goes. The removal of it is my least favorite part. I forget how long the needle is until I am taking it out, and I no longer want to hold it straight. I manage just fine still. I cap the needle and put it in the empty laundry detergent bottle. 

It must have been only five seconds that I was there, seeing you through the trees, as the trees. But I felt dusty like the lapping folds of embroidery patchwork in the thrift store, or the moose whose eyes were replaced with marbled glass the first time we saw him, before I became him. 

But that is how I know you are someplace I can look for, past or future, because you were in those woods too. All parts of you, your physical body, your mind and soul. And since you had slipped, I didn’t think it was possible, but now I am looking for you more frequently and fervently, hoping you will recognize me too, maybe taking the form you can most recognize me as, the body that found you in the first place. And isn’t that ironic? The first time we met, I had slipped on the sidewalk and you caught me. I had slipped to you. 

You always marvelled at the lace on display behind museum glass. I visit now nearly every day, hovering over where they are pinned—hoping that you are caught in the lattice work, if only for a moment, and can see me staring back. If you are there, I wonder if you feel the hands that moved the thread as you were made. The click-clack of knobs in the same place over and over. I also hang up every embroidery design on the wall, windows for you to peer through, if you get a chance.

Or maybe for a moment, you are reading this too, from the marbled glass eyes of a moose that hangs over my head right now. I always told you I wanted to visit that cabin once more. I hope you can read my message in a bottle and look for me too.

I think I may have a pretty good idea, as I have had time to write to you, what causes my slipping. Yet, I still have no idea what caused yours. And maybe slipping is the process of the degree, so to speak. Slipping connotes the movement, and slippage the degree to which one falls, but now I’m looking to what that destination really is. You moved into those things of the past, and I of the present, but I think this emerging thing is looking towards the future. I know how you felt as we braced each other on the train platform, before I was holding onto air.  The slipping took your body with you this time. I hope you are safe while you are moving through to your destination. In no time at all, I will slip again to you.