Heva comes at 3 AM. She knocks at the door of the old apartment, and I go to answer.

“Thank you for coming.”

She always does.

O, Heva, Goddess of Knots
With pine-needle hair, green and brown, falling like a shaken tree down her shoulders and back
With the candlewick at the center of her tongue softly burning, light and heat spilling out from her lips with every word, thin curls of smoke from her nostrils with every breath
With two slender arms on the right, quick and precise
With one mighty arm on the left, thick with muscle

“Another bad tangle, Peter…”

Her voice is somewhere between singing and softly weeping.

Heva gets straight to work, marching through the old apartment. With those two slender right arms, she starts to untie.

I try to find room for the electric kettle in one of the cardboard boxes marked “Kitchen”. I’m attached to the counter, coffee stains on the wood, so many mornings. Heva’s right arms carefully unravel me from around the handles of the cabinets while Mikayla comes with some wet wipes. “There’s a lot more elbow-room at the new place…”

She’s right; Heva gently guides my cords off of all the snags and hooks, out of the vents above the stove, which never worked quite right, out from under the legs of the table, which is at the wrong height for our chairs, already packed away. She opens the fridge and pulls out the connections that have gotten stuck in the door.

It’s even easier in the living room. I’m only slightly looped around the television; there’s a bigger one in the new apartment. It only takes Heva a little work to dig my strands out from between the itchy couch cushions.

But then the bedroom…

Knots and tangles everywhere… all the things that have happened here. Mikayla and I both have threads knotted to the smoke alarm on the ceiling, which beeped in the worst possible way when it ran out of batteries, but for a month, we just got used to it. The scratch marks along the floor, Mikayla dragging the dresser, she’s not letting me in tonight, even if I apologize… the scratch marks from dragging it back after she changes her mind.

But Heva simply fishes out the wire from the narrow spaces between the floorboards and feeds it back into Mikayla’s chest. “Thank you.” Better to let go. Start fresh somewhere new.

But my ties always seem to run deeper. The bit of wall where I slumped, exhausted after all my shouting… the corner where Mikayla held me, dried my tears… not simple knots. Heva tries her best. But the threads are too tangled, congealed, no more separate little feelings.

There’s nothing gentle to be done about it. Heva grasps the tangled cords with her strong left hand and, with a jerk of her elbow, she snaps them. A broken blood vessel, pain, and a numb warmth spilling out into myself.

Soon enough, it’s all done. Dust, swept away. Things, packed. Quick walkthrough, make sure there’s nothing left, and then—

“Bye-bye, house,” murmurs Mikayla, stepping into the hallway. I stop short.

I can’t leave. All the cords and ties and hopes, building a home here together… first moving in last year, I’d never imagined leaving, just like I never imagine leaving, and now…

It’s oak-tree thick, out of my chest, branching off to snag everywhere: the doorknobs that I’ve turned every day, in and out of the bathroom, the back stairwell down to the basement, carrying the laundry in big heavy baskets.

The grills of the stove, scrambling eggs every morning. The faucets in the sinks and the shower, the tiles on the walls that I’ve been staring at every day while washing my hair. The windows where you can look out just before nightfall to see the city and a perfect sunset, the light switches that I’ve learned to find in the dark, coming home late or getting up early, the power-outlets that aren’t quite placed where I’d wished, a little too far from the bed or the couch, always on the wrong side for the charging-port on my laptop.

This place has shaped me into the shape of it. I walk the floors like my blood flowing through my own body, and even before she takes hold of any of the fibers, Heva already knows that there is no untying this knot. This isn’t a way that a person can just decide not to feel anymore.

The Goddess looks at me and shakes her head—but I already know, too. I knew the moment Mikayla said it, “Bye-bye, house.”: I just can’t say goodbye. Not on my own.

“Do it,” I whisper.

Heva has always been kind to me. She doesn’t hesitate. She grabs hold of the thick tangle with her left hand, and with the strength of her arm, she snaps all the threads—one single sharp yank. I manage not to collapse to the ground, sobbing, but the torn off-vessels of my heart pour out onto the floor. Mikayla pauses, out in the hallway.

“It’s okay,” she says. “We won’t have to do this again. Our next move will be the house we buy together. Permanent.”

Her loops and knots go tangling around my arms and legs, my chest, my neck. Heva watches it happen, just like she’s seen it happen before, and before, and before. And she is the Goddess of Knots; she knows things: left alone too long, all these loops and tangles will snarl and calcify like those ropes from my heart, like my lines to the bedroom—like Mary and Sarah and Adelaide and before and before. She knows me. She knows this won’t last, either. I’ll fail.

It’s not too late. She moves towards me, fingers on both her right hands getting ready. But I shake my head.

“No,” I say. “This is how I want it.”