A Language of Limbs

Sadness, I think, is the object. And grief is the negative space.

Coming is arriving, I think, and I have, exquisitely, arrived.

All the books speak of butterflies, but I feel birds in my stomach, thick-winged and thrashing.

As if, in this damp darkness, I am the window that's letting the light in, the breath of fresh air she's been blue waiting for.

I think sometimes of the "closet", the place, the word and its attachments. A closet, after all, is a small space. It exists within a home, but it is starved. There is no light in there, no air, no room to fuck, no place to sleep. It is safe, for a time, perhaps. But a body in there will erode. Until its flesh is all gone and it becomes a secret of bones. To come out is to escape the secret, to stretch your limbs and bathe your skin in light. Sometimes. Because to come out can also be a sharper death, a quicker death. Total obliteration. Either way, to come out is always the end of something.

it is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Because a love that never could be, is now the love that never was.

Because loving her is a process of learning her. It is walking through a landscape to a horizon that deepens the closer I get. It is all the parts of her that were once tinged blue with distance, now here, close up, learnt and full of colour.

ago who sat at the back of the church because no one in that steel town knew that Dave and Andrew loved and loved and loved. Relentlessly. No one knew that Dave sat there in the church for two hours feeling like his borders had become porous and that he was spilling out through his skin. Lost to dirt and rock and ocean. Because a love that never could be, is now the love that never was.

I’m no longer resenting my flesh for what it couldn’t become.

(...) when we are outside, I learn the sick pleasure of almost kisses, of side glances and wanting smiles. I learn how pining starts between the thighs and spreads outwards, stomach clenched and fingers feeling like shallow light because all the blood is rushing out of them. And it's not that I haven't yearned before. This feeling has been long deep in me, but that now it is swollen with promise and fully realised.

Saying her name, I feel the whole of her pass through my mouth, out between my teeth, across my lips, into the cabin of the truck, out the window, into the blue sky. My first and only love. Leaving me. And I know, somehow, that I won't say her name again. Because it hurts too much to yearn for a return. I resign to her leaving my body, feeling that this is enough, to be witnessed by Dave, in the here and now, to have someone in this big wide world know that I loved her. That I loved her. That it was real. I loved her so much, I say.