Exploration in Digital Literature

Cutting Away at Memories

While using the scissors to cut the cloth, information is revealed about the narrator's current state in life and about her relationship with her mother. The cloth details how the narrator's life as an adult is filled with laundry disasters and how her garments have been ruined by her negligence. The narrator then says that "with every loss I felt I let her down", which appears to be a reference to her mother. These statements, which are part of the work's narrative, allow the reader to explore the narrator's relationship with her mother, which seems to be one that is influential because even as an adult, the narrator considers how her mother would disapprove of her habits. The cloth also mentions how the narrator questions if she is supposed to be a certain shape and follows with a comment on how the narrator's mother would often talk about her small waist size. These statements suggest that the narrator feels unable to meet a certain size expectation, which is likely fueled by her mother's apparent fixation on having a small waist. The mechanics of this work, which involve cutting away at cloth, serve as a way of metaphorically representing how the narrator feels cut up because of her disorderly clothing situation and her thoughts of her mother's disappointment, and because of the reality that she is not as skinny as her mother may want her to be.

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