My dad passed away in August of 2024, only a few days before my junior year at Appalachian State University. I spent half of the semester helping my mom and sisters prepare for the funeral. The other half was spent trying to catch up in my classes. As the semester wrapped up, I had more time to process everything. I thought of the funeral, him, the future, and things I thought I had more time for. We had a complicated relationship and I was conflicted about everything. I had never experienced the type of loss that wasn’t black and white.

The rubik’s cube accidentally became a symbol of figuring things out, specifically about grieving. I had started my attempt at solving one for the first time within that first couple of months after he passed. Sometimes when I tried to avoid things, I found myself gravitating to the cube, captivated in the process of putting the colors together.

I documented my progress on the rubik’s cube with yarn, piecing each row carefully together as its own puzzle. By the end of it, I had solved that knitting puzzle and found a new perspective about grieving. It wasn’t something that was going to be impossible to figure out, I’d get it with time.