The yarn ball sits on the table. It weighs about as much as an apple. The label is already off. It’s just wool now.

The outside end is easy to find. It’s the one that’s been offered up. The center end takes digging. Fingers in, past the first soft layers, until you hit the little cave.

Two needles. Two cast-ons. Same source.

The ball feels like a cat curled in your palm. Warm weight. A small thing with its own rules.

The outside pull behaves. It feeds out clean and the twist stays put. The ball keeps its roundness and rolls a bit when you tug.

The center pull gives too easily, then not at all. It unspools in a hurry and you get slack pooling in your lap. The strand comes out kinked from being stored in a tight spiral. It wants to remember the shape it had.

I started one pattern from the outside end. A hat. Plain ribbing to get going.

From the center, a second pattern. A cowl with cables. Same evening. Same hands. Same mug cooling beside me.

By the third row the yarn was already acting like two different yarns. The outside strand lay calm on the needle. The center strand kept curling back on itself, like it was trying to return to where it came from.

You can see twist differently depending on the direction it travels. Some yarns are polite either way. Some look a little fidgety when they’re pulled against their own spin. The fabric tells on it. Not better or worse. Just a different face.

The ball changes shape as you work. The center hollows first. Your fingers reach in and find air where there used to be fiber. The outside still looks normal, but the inside is going empty.

A factory knot came through on the hat side around row twelve. A small hard lump, tied at the mill when something broke. I worked it through a purl section and kept going.

Two days later the same knot came through the cowl side. Same knot. Different context. This time it landed in the middle of a cable crossing. I looked at it for a while. Then I let it stay.

The hat grows in the morning. Better light. Fresh hands. The cowl gets the evening hours, when the television is on and my shoulders have already done their day.

Gauge splits into two records. The ruler doesn’t settle anything. The fabric knows which hours it came from.

Two separate timelines made from the same material.

Some evenings I switch back and forth. A few rows on one. A few rows on the other. No system. Just whatever my hands reach for. The yarn between them gets shorter each time. The distance from hat to cowl, measured in what’s left.

The ball is starting to look wrong now. Not round anymore. More like a skin. The center pull comes easier because there’s nothing left to grip. The outside pull starts to drag against the hollow.

My fingers feel the change before my eyes do.

The hollow part keeps growing.