We all have this spool, you see, of little red string.

We don’t know how long it is or how much time we have to unravel it before we meet the string at its end. But with this spool, we leave a trail behind us everywhere we go. Pinning our strings to different moments and memories that stand out to us, making loops to wrap around the pins as we move from point to point. We slowly let ourselves unravel, at times reaching a knot in the spool, a tiny imperfection that inhibits us, but with patience, we fix it and carry on.

We hold onto our string, some in our heart, some in our hands, nimbly unraveling the little red string as we mark our path and journey onward. Slowly, as time carries on, our string becomes a tangled web, intertwined and held to each other by shared moments and crossing paths. Our tangled strings are connecting my heart to your heart, binding us to each other, connecting in me the little piece of something greater to the little piece in you. The piece that holds promise for something that stands taller than the mass of tangled red string, something greater than this web we have created before us. Sometimes we trip, sometimes we fall over our tangles and ties as we get lost in the circles we’ve been running, failing to remember that our trail of red string follows us.

With our spool we tie little knots to people, hoping to keep them with us, forcing them to come along with us on our journey. Sometimes those ties snap and we lose each other in the masses, but we still have our journey made true in the trail left behind. Even some strings, on paths who have crossed a thousands times, fail to meet until the exact moment, a moment that had been prepared for us so artfully that it took the time of the path up until now to make you the person you are, and that the path taken, although full of missed opportunities and crossed strings, was necessary to culture a heart that it is full and ready to receive you as the person you have become.

I want to look down upon my globe, to see the map of the path I’ve taken, to remember all of the things I saw, the people I met. And maybe I will be able to see how they all became pinpoints, the pins of memories that connected to relationships I had made from the people I had met. And ultimately I can come to the conclusion that the web of red string, tangled as it is, connecting the points of a map, resembling the mass of monumental moments experienced, isn’t meant to be traced, but rather admired. We cannot help but marvel at our own maps with something of awe and gratitude, to be impressed by the spool of red string unraveled and the plethora of moments that mattered.

And maybe all this time, we thought we were weaving our own web, when in reality, we were just in place to hold the spool, to give it some slack when we feel a tug from an unknown source. Instead of questioning its source, our curiosity blinds us as we are occupied with our new destination, and our avidity to move forward.

We all have this spool, you see, of little red string. And it draws me to places, to people, to you. I once thought I spun my own spool, leaving it behind me wherever I journey to, but now I know it’s by my little red string that I am pulled to you, to this place, to this moment, to this knot that marks this point as wholly significant. All of this by a little red string.