By Maryam Abdulla
There is a version of me you have probably met. It is neat. Polished. It holds up under pressure, dries fast when soaked, is resilient in a way that looks impressive from afar. It moves through the world like it belongs, and sometimes it almost convinces me. But there is a cost to that kind of utility. There is a stiffness, a brittleness, a shine that looks like strength but cracks if you pull too hard at the seams. That exterior, what I have learned to show, is functional. Synthetic. Not breathable. Suffocating.
Beneath it, there is something else entirely. Softer. Slower. Less put-together. It wrinkles easily. It clings to memory, absorbs and holds on to more than it should. It is the part of me that remembers the way someone said goodbye, not just the words but the temperature of the air, the sound of a door closing, the rustle of fabric as they shift away. It is the echo of their voice fading, leaving a hum in the silence that follows. It is the part that cries at scenes in movies that are not sad, just quietly true. The part that makes note of the exact warmth of sunlight slipping past the curtains, because for a moment, it felt like a person I miss.
No one really sees that lining. At least, not unless they are looking hard. I keep it tucked under layers of functionality and performance. Most people are content with what is on the surface, and I have become good at tailoring it to fit.
Still, I think about the stitching a lot: The way everything holds together. How some pieces of myself do not match and were not meant to. How some parts fray faster than others. There are versions of me that grew out of specific places and times, dialects I picked up and then dropped, hobbies I tried because someone I loved… loved them first. Some of those parts no longer feel like “me,” but I keep them anyway, stitched into the larger whole.
That is the thing about patchworks. They do not always start deliberately. Sometimes they are just the result of necessity: wear and tear, damage control, sentimentality. You patch what you cannot bear to throw away. And over time, the mending becomes its own kind of design.
My father taught me how to sew. Not professionally, not even particularly well. He showed me how to thread the machine, how to guide the fabric without forcing it, how to listen for the change in sound when something was not right. My stitches were clumsy at first, too tight, too loose, lines that wandered off course, but he said it did not have to be perfect to be strong. What mattered was that it held. Over time, I began to understand that sewing was not just about fixing things. It was about staying with what had come apart. Sitting with the damage. Believing that a tear did not mean the end. That with enough thread, enough care, you could teach something to hold again even if the seam showed. I think about that often: How much care it takes to mend something. The closeness it demands. How you have to look at a thing long enough to understand where it came undone.
I did not inherit his patience with a needle. But I did inherit his impulse: to salvage. To preserve. Maybe that is why I have kept pieces of people long after they have left. A song I skip every time, but never remove from the queue. The old version of myself they once believed in. None of these things make sense side by side, but they are stitched into me anyway.
I used to think all of this made me inconsistent. Fragmented. A collection of borrowed colours and mismatched textures. But now I am starting to believe that this very layering, this irregularity is a kind of coherence too. Maybe it is not the seamlessness that holds us together, but the stitching itself. The willingness to bind what does not naturally belong, and to wear it anyway.
There is something beautiful in that labour. In the choice to make meaning out of the disparate, the damaged, the inherited. In refusing the illusion of uniformity. Not everything has to match to belong.
Still, it is hard. Sometimes I catch myself envying those who seem to live in a single fabric, who appear unconflicted, smooth, whole. Their identities do not bleed when soaked in water too warm. Their languages do not get stuck in their throat. Their memories do not interrupt the present with sharp, sudden edges. But maybe that is just another illusion. Maybe we all wear layers. Some people are just better at hiding the stitching.
There are days when the exterior wears thin. When the practiced responses fail, when the small talk tastes like ash. When I want to turn myself inside out and just say what I mean. But I do not. Not always. Vulnerability does not move freely in public spaces. It does not breathe, does not hold up to friction.
It stains too easily.
So I keep that inner fabric close. Protected. I let it warm me in silence. I let it whisper the things I cannot say out loud. It knows me better than the outer layers do. It does not perform. It remembers.
Patchworks do not hide damage; they acknowledge it. They say, “Here is where I tore, and here is where I held myself together anyway.” There is no shame in being mended. There is grace in the repair.
I am not seamless. But I am held.