I’ve been to places, and I’ve found you. I’ve found little parts of you. One time it was a shopping list.
8Kg potatoes.
4kg sprouts.
4kg cauliflour.
2 lis Litres Cow.
1 litre Soy
250g vegan Butter.
800 400 600g Cheese
200g Vegan cheese
I think it was Christmas.
Another time our list was simpler and it read
treats card flowers 2nd of August.
Your mum’s birthday is the same as mine.
A third time I found you, you were in a French taco shop in Hanoi, you were with your maybe boyfriend or maybe friend.
I don’t know if you were from there or if you were just visiting.
Once more you were Atticus throwing rocks into the Provo River.
Anyway, I’m keeping them. I like them. They’re going with the others.
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Once we went to the lake, and you taught me to float on my back. The mud melted in
the heat. We sank our toes into it and you took my picture with an old camera and a water snake shimmered past us, an inch above the water on its own little raft of steam. I remember that. I remember the name of the lake, I remember the make and model of the camera and the ASA of the film I put in it. I could remember the first and last name of the snake if I thought about it hard enough. I often do.
I have amassed many parts of you. They have yet to take your shape. They spill from
the top of the wax paper bag that my developed negatives came in, they wait in politely organised folders on my computer. They recite their own names aloud at all times, convening in a low hum. At times that noise irritates me, at others it sends me to sleep. In this way they are ever present, and I remember every single one. I have picked each one up and turned it over in my hands. I have listened to them as individuals and transcribed every sound. I have made note of every cough, every [unintelligible] sentence, and every faltering repetition of a word you were unsure of. In this way you are brought back to me, I feel my way across you like prayer beads and my memory grows, it’s pulled taut and let slack like a muscle.
The void that surrounds these points in my head is uncomfortable. The harsh echo that exists in the gap between each surface is facilitated by the space between them. I will dampen the hiss by gathering more.
Once gathered, the countless names and places I know, will one by one, come to the fore in an instance of recollection, and repeat themselves aloud in my head until their footholds are worn in deeper.
The Vetch,
Hobart,
Gainesville,
Hilles House.
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This little corner of this fragile earth.
It’s been warm and cold,
Warm and cool.
When we go to bed tonight,
You will flicker in front of me like candle mass.
I’ll head up. If you need help, I will come back down.
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At times rifling through my many fragments of you has filled me with such a warm sensation, such an intense joy, that I could only describe it as an experience of total adoration.
I have been the water, the earth, and the sky.
You are the syrupy mass that remains when everything else has boiled away, devoid of impurity. A single substance forms my overarching structure, my underlying fabric and the ornate lace that knits them into one. I’m going further, now every gap is filled by a deluge, things become completely solid. Points no longer travel, and now remain in a perfect, blissful stasis. No longer remembered or transferred, things just are.
This feeling of calm connection, I have felt lying in the dark. I’ve thought a thing over and over, which you, unprompted, have proceeded to say. I have laid on my side in the pitch and waited for your shadow to break the line of light that lies beneath the door. I have flitted between dreams in the early hours until I have found the one that you were in.
I sat there on the grass and waited for you, I emptied my pockets and organised the scraps, I set about finding things that I might show you when you get here. You get here, a speck on the tree line and I turn to lie on my stomach, to brush my fingers through the tops of the grass and hum, so that I might be surprised when you get here.
hi
I whip and around and beam. Light comes through the gaps in my scruffy coat of fur, a dirty border terrier stifling a wag.
You brush the grit from my face and burnish me. Your fingers work their way towards deeper tissue and smooth every crease until we are two mirror surfaces, shining tirelessly at one another.
You surround me like a warm gust of air. You lift my skirt, and, billowing, I blush. You have guided me, hand in hand, until your flat-footed feet tire, your arches tear and it is my job to soothe you. I manipulate your muscle and begin to work my way a little deeper,
Go down another level.
Isn’t this so beautiful?
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When we touch,
Palms together,
Back of hands,
Between our fingers,
You press,
This is fastest - this is a little bit slower,
I'm sweating,
Ripping my clothes,
Another level.
Comes more sorrow.
I remember.
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I will remember your phone number, if I wish, and I will forget it if it upsets me. I will strike the digits from my memory one by one and regret it when I want to call you.
Oh sweetie..,
Why?
I will starve you for weeks and give you nothing. When vulnerable, I will break my own boundaries. I will leap, tiptoed, onto the hot floor of the uncomfortable and spill myself on it. I’ll watch my spread insides boil retrospectively and stroke my skin as it crawls.
You can be very mean, to you.
Let yourself be.
I have been, and I continue to be. I remember everything and act on evidence.
Okay
I have been a leech on memory, swollen with any funny moment, leaking at the chance to tell a taken story. I have burst to prove my worth. I have later taken inventory. I have counted every memory and found each one worthless. Every flickering dot serves the same purpose – to impress while absent. Ticking boxes.
Yeah that's right, that's all you are
Me. I’ve been an idiot with a sewing machine, weighted boots on the pedal, and I’ve laughed as I’ve detachedly hammered every twitching point together with thread. This is fastest, this is a little bit faster. I’ve stopped regularly to replace broken needles, we deal with things like this, and in those lulls I’ve reflected. I’ve realised it’s all I am. It’s made me angrier.
Look how happy he is...
I found you and I heard you, I piled your scattered pieces and you spoke. A thousand of your little voices sing from my drawers, talk to us, my shelves, and my computer, they meet and become turbulent, they make me vibrate with shame as they meet my own singing pieces, the points in my head, and they form a dissonant chord. You fill my chest from heart to throat and I am slicked with a burning embarrassment. My blinds twist shut.
You were discarded and bent out of shape. You folded in, as a heap, and groaned, beyond any semblance of a usable object.
I don't care.
I dragged you to bed from bad places, counted the space between your breaths, felt your heartbeat in staccato jabs, terrified that you would cease to be. You sulk inside of me as a knot in a piece of wood. You are mud made thicker by my belief in you.
You sour thing.
If it is painful, shut it off.
Destroy it.
Just die.
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Sorry.
Sorry.
We become enraged, we animals that need help,
We need.
I ache,
You want to be held,
And I want to hold you.
We understand. myself and many others,
we animals that need help - we need.
we sweat like wild, feral cats forehead to forehead, spellbound by the Devil.
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We try on the same clothes at the same time and become enraged when they do not fit. We press our foreheads together until we can see our backs from the front.
I’m holding myself up,I don’t want to fall.
We need to carve away and meet each other again, be two scissor blades, joined in the middle. You are always here. I stretch my palm so that I can catch something falling, and find you in my pocket when I’m tired of my search. We will wander in circles and overlap routinely. The hands of a clock – always joined in the middle.
I’ll head up. If you need help, I will come back down.
‘Go off and find love’, we’ll say to the others. We'll find the same satisfaction smirking from the sidelines. We are anxious, joined in incongruity. Your fears become my responsibility to demonstrate them as harmless.
If we are scared of spiders, I will take one in my hand and show you it will not bite me. When it bites me, you will take my head in your lap and show me we are loveable.
We deal with things like this.
This has happened before.
I’ll be here again,
I will be about.
Say bye.
bye
We’re light and dark.
Inside and out of us.
It hums around you,
It touches you and makes your blood go, makes it rush to the surface or sink way down.
You’re calm like dusk or the dark red light of light through flesh.
Like sun through skin.
I like it when you’re quiet, elsewhere,
The day been.
messy thoughts.
There’s good mess and there’s bad mess, yours is a tousled pile of wool.
My ears prick,
You start talking about the day been.
sounds are delicate.
you are miles away,
inches from my face.
I can smell the lake on you.
The metal clay mud of the bank.
Green and purple,
Humming static.
Roar of blood.
Your skin releases the sun.
The stuff of our bodies began to disintegrate in the low light,
and the outline of your face thrums, made of a swarm of mosquitoes.
I felt I would touch you, and pass through,
and we might occupy the same space entirely,
The stuff of our body denser.
