At first, it was only sounds that came to me. The clicking of thin metal hitting thin metal as thin wool slid quickly over thin needles. Stitch by small stitch, I experienced the world. 

Each small moment brought new life to my environment. Fuzzy light became blurry, colorless shapes. The shapes turned colorful and took on definite lines. The dull buzz behind the clicking separated into different types of sounds. I could actually feel the yarn bunch up and stretch out as she knit me. 

Knit. I remember feeling so happy when I thought of that word. It was surreal, for I could sense myself gaining knowledge as I began to form. Many sounds emerged from the buzz. Suddenly, I could tell the difference between the ringing of a telephone and the dinging of two elevators. I saw the warm color of a knit sweater offset by the refreshing dark hue of the pants I was starting to rest on. I knew immediately these colors were red and black. 

I could feel energy pulsing through me, though I didn’t have a heart. I was connected to the needles, the human, and skein. I didn’t fully understand the word skein when it first came to me. I just knew it held the potential for making many things after me. To me, skein meant future and prosperity, a place where many of my kinfolk would come from. 

As I learned more and more things, I was filled with a yearning to know my name. What exactly was I? I didn’t know. 

My grasp on the needles was waning. Where I had felt so connected before, I now hung slightly suspended in the air. There was a certain finality to it that I didn’t quite understand. Then with a few quick turns of the needles and a flick of the human’s wrists, I was removed from the needles all together. It was exhilarating.

I heard a quick snip and suddenly I was disconnected from the skein. Now my energy was totally self-contained. And, since I was just myself now, I knew what I was: a mitten.

Mitten. Oh. For all my anticipation, the word felt unfulfilling. Mitten. 

The human picked me up and stretched out my stitches a bit, which felt nice. She held me up toward bright lights. I felt proud but still incomplete. 

With a satisfied grin, she tossed me into a bag. It was full of objects that I couldn’t identify, except for the skein and scissors. Very few ideas came to me without me experiencing things first. One was love. We are all born with that. The other was fear of specific things. Scissors, for one, but also dryer, rodent, and claws.

 I lay close to the skein. I could feel, examine, and explore what I had previously been. Though it had seemed electric while I was being knit, it now sat lifelessly.

The human took the end of the skein and began to twist it onto the needles. I could not tell what she was doing at first. I sat wondering, waiting, watching her hands guide the yarn methodically. As I watched the rhythm of her hands, I suddenly recognized it as the pattern of stitches that had formed me. Yes! It was another, identical mitten!

I envied the new mitten, wishing to again go through the joy of experiencing life for the first time. The human turned the metal needles, and row by row, there she glimmered. The white yarn that formed her glowed brightly under the spotlight of clinical ceiling lights. I counted the moments until she was complete. It seemed an eternity.

Finally, she too was cut from the skein and stretched. I waited in anticipation for her to be tossed into the purse as well. The fear of her being as lifeless as the skein overcame me for a moment. It dissipated as the human slid the other mitten onto her hand. She then picked me up and put me on her other hand. 

The human clasped her hands together. For the first time, I felt the other mitten. A new word came with it: mittens.

Now this was my name. Mitten by itself was not complete. The two of us, mittens, was truly who I was. Or, I suppose I should say, who we were. We was another new word, but this one felt good to think, too. 

It was in this moment that life was perfect, so it was in this moment that everything started to go wrong. The human stood, grabbed her purse, and walked to another place. I was pulled away from my Match, weighed down by the purse in the human’s hand. Her other hand, with the other mitten, swung freely as she walked. 

Where were we going? What was happening? I didn’t know. 

The human stepped outside and suddenly a burst of cold hit us. The cold of the air contrasted with the warmth of the human’s skin made me uncomfortable. I wished I could will myself to move as the human could, but I could not. 

Then too many words hit me all at once: keys, car, handle, inside, keys again, button, knob, steering wheel. The last word, steering wheel, held such enormous power in it, I sensed a weight in my fibers at the feel of it. It controlled this car and held the power to kill. I hated the knowledge and the responsibility, but there was nothing I could do. I was comforted by the fact that my Match was on the other side of the steering wheel. We could bear the burden of it together. 

The time we spent holding the steering wheel was both far too long and gone in an instant. Another barrage of words hit my consciousness as the human exited the car and took us with her. Before I knew it, we were struck with the word shopping cart, which baffled me immensely. 

The next few moments changed everything that had happened before. That’s saying a lot, since I had just been created, met my Match, and held a steering wheel within hours of each other. No, this was worse. 

My Match and I were pulled from the hands of the human and tossed into the cart. Air whisked through my stitches, erasing any traces of warmth from the human’s skin. I fell. And kept falling. My Match was caught in the basket of the cart, but I kept falling. Through the dingy wires and down to a dirty, tile floor. 

It couldn’t be happening. 

But it was. One moment, I was with my Match, and the next, I was on the floor. The cart started rolling. I went unnoticed; the human kept walking. I was in the middle of the floor, cold and lost. 

The tiles were white, though slightly stained from years of soles passing over them. I cursed the tiles, knowing that if I had been any other color, the human would have seen me instead of walking right over me. I resigned myself to the fate of tiled eternity when a gust of wind from the opening doors sent me forward a few inches.

Another cart rumbled the ground around me. It stopped, its wheels close enough to have pressed me into the ground. A new human picked me up, examined me, and placed me in their cart. We started in the direction of my Match. I thought everything would go back to normal.

Then at the last minute, this human turned left, away from my Match. No! I screamed to myself as we traveled. No! But there was nothing I could do. 

This human took me out of their cart, studied a rack of something, and placed me carefully on top of another set of gloves. These were unfamiliar to me. They hung quietly together, connected at the cuffs by a small plastic piercing. They were perfectly identical and they wreaked of manufactured scents. As we touched, I could almost picture the huge machines that had knit their stitches. Emotionless beasts that vomited complete mittens into bins to be punctured and shipped off to who knows where. 

I was filled with the sudden and irreversible urge to leave, to reunite with my Match; I had had enough trauma for one day. But, alas, it was not to be. 

I waited there for hours. Every once and a while a human would pick me up to see if I had a match, but I never did. More and more hours passed. I prayed that my Match was still in this building, though I knew chances were slim. 

Finally, a new type of human stopped by. This one carried an air of duty and boredom. The others were always looking for something. This one acted like it belonged to this building. When the human noticed I did not have my Match, they took me away from the bin. By now my naivete had all but vanished; I knew they were not taking me to my Match, but an inkling of hope did remain in me. It was not satisfied because I was taken to yet another place in this building. 

A thick set of shiny doors opened to a room that felt like a chasm. Footsteps made by humans echoed over tall shelves with boxes and crates. Whereas the previous room was filled with subdued beeping and hauntingly cheery music, this one held the air of gloom that had been packaged and shelved to catch a pretty penny. I hated this room even more than the last. 

The human walked quickly, giving me barely any chance to study my newest surroundings. I wasn’t sure if I was happy about this or not. Before I could decide, I was on a box, by myself this time. Packaging tape sealed it shut so I couldn’t even guess what was inside it. Skyscraper shelves were on one side of the box, while more, bigger and thicker doors were across a spacious corridor on the other side of the box. 

A few uncomfortable minutes passed before a huge monster drove up to the box. It was like a car but bigger and more square. It had two metal teeth that slid underneath the box and lifted it into the air. I thought for sure I would fly off the box and be trampled by this monster, but I stayed attached by one lucky corner of tape that had lifted up and adhered itself to me. The large doors opened to reveal a freezing, white covered world.

More mechanical nightmares with gaping holes sat outside the doors. Most had huge boxes in them, just like the one I was on. Two humans closed the mouth of one, and it roared as it awoke. It rolled slowly away from the building. 

The monster that I was on made its way forward, holding the box in front of it like a sacrifice to the open monster. I was panicking. What was I going to do? It really didn’t matter what I wanted to do; I was at the complete mercy of the monster and the packaging tape. A shadow fell over the box as the monster set it down inside the other monster. Energy zinged through the box beneath me, energy that foretold a long trip to an unknown destination. 

This was worse than I ever could have imagined. The monster backed away, taking its metal fangs with it. It got a second box to place with the first. As it neared me, it lifted the box until it was tall enough to fit in the space above me. I was horrified when I realized that was exactly what the monster intended to do. I imagined the feeling of being crushed by this box, but a human appeared next to the boxes, seemingly out of nowhere. It carelessly tore me off the tape, freeing and fraying the fibers of my stitches. The relief was brief and inevitably replaced with more fear.

Again, I went flying through the air, this time landing on a mass of wrinkled, scrappy cardboard. I slid down the cardboard towards a metal edge of the dumpster and fell into a pit of shredded stuff. Something rustled the shreds beneath me. I tried to keep my imagination off of what it could be. Maybe ten minutes passed. I was hopeful that another miracle would arise.

But what arose instead was a furry brown snout with whiskers and a pink nose that twitched quickly. This struck fear into me. More than before. This was just as destructive as the steering wheel. Beady black eyes followed the nose, staring me down. Then its mouth opened and its teeth snapped down around my middle. 

Rodent. A sickening word to me. Those teeth held memories of tearing yarn and string apart. I was twice the size of this creature, but that would not matter if this rodent decided to tear into me. I waited anxiously as the creature decided what to do with me. 

One moment its nose was twitching and the next moment we were scurrying up the stack of cardboard. It jumped out of the dumpster and made its way across more dumpsters and general heaps of garbage to the ground. The white stuff on the ground was no longer a mystery. As I was dragged over it, its cold name came to me: snow. The dampness it brought rushed over me again and again until all I heard was snow snow snow. The extra water started to weigh me down. I imagined the rodent struggling, which I thought was fair. Compared to what it would do to me, this was nothing. And in that moment, fate pulled another twist. 

The light of the outside world was dimming. The atmosphere whispered the word dusk. Neither I nor the rodent noticed the predator until it was too late. In an imperceivable instant, I was back in the air. The rodent went limp. A new word, death, washed over me. Reeling with the weight of the new word and now dizzy from the sudden incline in altitude, I feared the thing that had done this. I struggled to understand what had happened. It certainly wasn’t a human, though that was my first guess. My flexible nature, added to the speed at which we traveled through the sky, caused me to bend backward and graze the talon of an owl. 

It was another creature, this one bigger and possibly of less harm to me. We glided over buildings and cars. The pulsing wind generated by the owl’s wings made me flap wildly. The rodent still hung limply in the owl’s talons, but the grip of its mouth was slowly loosening. I prepared myself for another excursion through the air. My last stitches slipped out of the rodent’s lifeless mouth, and I fell. The now familiar feeling of wind rushing through my stitches lasted much longer than any other time. I was being propelled towards the ground with such natural force that it was almost a calm experience. Its word: gravity.

I hit the ground with a dull thump. Snow surrounded me, and though it was cold, I was happy to not be in the air. A word struggled to surface from under the snow, gradually seeping upward. Apparently, I was on the snow and the snow was on a sidewalk. 

I studied my newest resting area. The sky was almost totally dark now, save for one large light in the sky. As I looked closer at it, I noticed thousands of smaller lights dotting the black and blue backdrop of sky. Stars as they are called, were beautiful, especially when seen for the first time. In fact, I was so mesmerized by these stars that I didn’t notice the mailbox pole until the wind blew me against it. 

But that mailbox pole was not the only thing I found, no. There, laying daintily on the snow, was my Match. The wind had been so kind as to lay part of us atop each other. My being flooded with relief, and I could feel hers did too. I shared my memories of the day with her and she waited patiently as I exhaustedly explained how much I had missed her. After I had finished, I was perplexed by a sudden question; how had she come to be here? I didn’t have to ask, though, because she then shared her memories with me.

She and the human had continued shopping even though I had fallen through the cart. They bought cans of food and coffee and napkins and many other such groceries. When the human went back to the car and realized I was not there, she had gone back to the store to look for me, but to no avail. Defeated, she drove away. My Match told me that the place we were at now was where the human was, inside the building across the snow-covered lawn. 

When she was taking the groceries inside, my Match had fallen out of the bag near this mailbox. Match had waited here all day without being noticed. I told her that that was probably lucky considering I was thrown into the air every time I was noticed. We both thought that was funny and soon settled into looking at the stars together. 

Hours passed, but it was completely unlike the other hours I had endured. These hours were with my Match and the stars, and they were perfect. 

Light crept back into the sky. One by one the stars blinked out of our vision. We waited even longer. A light dusting of snow fell from the sky, but we did not fear because we had each other. It was lucky that neither of us got entirely covered because a new human approached us. This human was interested in us. She scooped us off the ground and placed us in her coat pocket. It felt good, as if pockets were where mittens belonged. 

My Match became very excited as the human neared the house. She told me it was because she felt the presence of the human who had knit us getting closer. The human who carried us went through one door, showed us to other humans while jabbering at them, then went out the door again. I was confused. Wasn’t the one who knitted us here? The human who carried us certainly wasn’t her. This one was young and angry. She took us to a new door, just opposite of the one she had previously gone through. We hoped this was where our maker was.

Then it hit us: the familiarity of her smell, the electricity of created objects, the warmth of her presence. The human took us out of her pocket again. We expected to be flung through the air; that was all humans were good at. Instead, the human walked over to the one who made us and dropped us onto her lap. 

Joy overcame us. This is where our existence had begun. It felt incredibly right to be here again. The human who had brought us inside, our rescuer and guardian angel, left. I wished for a moment that I had studied her features before she left, but there was no time. 

Of course, our maker had to wash and dry us, but that is a different story. 

And as long as I am with my Match, this story is complete.