Have you ever felt like a ball of yarn? I feel like one today. Such a curious thing to compare myself to. A ball of yarn. A knot of fibers, spooled around its own center, waiting to be knitted into something useful. A sweater is better than a scarf is better than an idle piece of thread, I say. I remember as a kid, every time my grandmother would sit down to knit the newest crop of sweaters, I would inadvertently find a ball of yarn that wasn't part of the color scheme, and play with it for hours on end. Raveling and unraveling, practicing my knotting skills (or lack thereof), trying to find that hidden cork that held all that thread together. Did you ever wonder what lay at the heart of that great big ball of gray yarn?

I wanted to find out one day, so I did. I decided to pick up a ball that wasn't being used and began to take it apart, loop by loop. Oh, and I took it for a walk with me. Up the stairs and back down, through the kitchen, into the bedroom, and around my mother's pretty red high heels. The sound that followed from her throat (after her heels snagged in the yarn) wasn't exactly the sweetest that she could come up with. But imagine my surprise, when at trying to find the cork inside the ball, all I'd ended up with was a whole lot of... nothing.

That's just how I'd like to unravel - I'd like to slip outside the pet flap in my door (if I had a door like that), roll down the steps, on to the street, latch on to the bumper of a car due south by south-east and find myself in the heart of the Grand Canyon with a whole lot of nothing on my shoulders. Or my back.

I'd love to be a ball of yarn today.