It's Still Life

Dead Men Don’t Drown

A Liturgy for an Unraveller
(for those who stop accepting the family yarn)

I. The Thread That Holds
Every family has a story,
a yarn spun so long and so often
it becomes indistinguishable from truth.

It is the tale told at gatherings,
the narrative that keeps the peace
by keeping certain doors closed.

You were raised on this yarn.
You learned its rhythms, pauses, and silences.
You knew which parts to repeat
and which to swallow.

II. The Loose Thread
But one day,
you notice a loose thread.

A date that does not match.
A name that is never spoken.
A silence that arrives too early.
And stays too long.

You pull the thread
to understand.
And the yarn begins to unravel.

III. The Unravelling
What happens when you stop accepting
the family yarn?

The story you were raised on
begins to fray.
The edges you trusted
begin to blur.
The people you loved
begin to look different.
Not less,
But more.

More complicated.
More human.
More capable of both
the love and the lie.

You are not betraying them.
You are seeing them.
And seeing is the first act
of true belonging.

IV. The Courage to Ask
It takes courage to question the yarn,
to risk being called difficult,
disloyal,
too curious for your own good.

But the courage is worth it.
Because the yarn is not the family.
The family is the people
in all their flawed, fierce,
tangled humanity.

To unravel the yarn
is not to destroy the family.
It is to meet them
without the filter
of the story they told
to protect themselves.

V. For the Unraveller
See the loose thread you noticed.
Be the courage that made you pull it.
Hold the yarn as it unravels,
may it reveal not ruin,
but truth.

Care for the family behind the story,
may they find you
not as a threat,
but as a witness
who loves them enough
to see them whole.

And be the one
who dared to ask
what the silence was hiding.

You are not breaking the family.
You are remaking it,
into something truer,
something freer,
something that can hold
both the love and the lie.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “Yarn”.  To read all episodes in this series, click here. Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is authentically my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.