A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

I liked how it felt, being turned inside out, learning that the self becomes whole in the moment it is opened.

I like that to her, I am a stranger now. I like that she hates me. Because, I realise, hate and love sometimes come wrapped up and intertwined. It’s easier, this way.

People are looking at me, I think. Then I realise, no, they’re not. None of them. Because they have gossip and chitchat and catch-ups, and books to read and children to watch in the water. They have lives that exist here and now. And none of them knows that I can’t go home. That I have no home. That I loved my best friend and now I might die.

I feel overdressed and foolish. But this is the normal bit, to be fifteen years old and self-conscious of my half-formed breasts and meaty thighs. I can stomach this bit. It’s that other bit I can’t. It’s the walking slowly, the not wanting to reach my clothes on the sand because when I put them on, what else is there?

I get to exist between books. Tiny worlds open up to me and become big. I go somewhere else, into the blackened woods of old fairytales, into the blinding white of future stars. I read and read and read.

I realise that most endings happen to us. That often, you don’t know the last word will be the last until it already has been. Handing in a school assignment. Getting a hug from my mother. Sleeping in the only bed I’ve ever slept in. Kissing her in the shadows of my family home. Feeling her reach deep inside me. You just don’t know that the last time is going to be the last time until it already has been.

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 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. 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.

Many historians have attempted to erase us, Geoff says. They’ve never favoured those with our kind of…disposition…but we’ve always been here, in the margins…if you know where to look.

I know already that I will never see her again, not in the flesh of the awake. Only in dreams, where she will lurk in the river veins of my limbs, stirring from time to time like silt stirred up from the bed of my sleeping body, clouding the water. And I will wake every time in the cold sweat of this very heartbreak, as if no time has passed at all. Because the river of mountain memory is achingly fresh. And my face will be wet with tears, not because I’ve dreamt of her again after all these years, but because in this dream, I am kissing her, and now I’ve woken up.

Our bodies are a photomontage of unlikely images, assembled so artfully we create a brilliant new picture, stuck together with glue and staples. We are united. Neither their pointed eyes nor pointed fingers can tear this picture apart, because we are bolstered by our rage and our love. Because when you humiliate and make small, the rest of us become bigger to fill the space, holding the family portrait intact.

Learning, I realise, is a process of untangling.

I think, look at us. Witness us. In a world that wishes for our annihilation, here are our bodies, spectacularly colliding.

I remember, I used to love this. Back in the library, thinking one day one day one day I’m going to get a scholarship and study literature and be a real writer. It dawns on me that I still love this. That, perhaps, writing was never my way out, but always my way in.

Years from now, I’ll remember the sounds of bones breaking. Because they hit us with batons, and we fight back with fists and feet and metal bin lids. And I don’t know where to look, where to run, who to fight, because all around me, my friends are being dragged and beaten. So I look up, beyond the buildings, to the sky, and wonder, who is looking back? Who is seeing this? In all our humiliation and heartbreak, who is witnessing us?

Uranian House, as it has always been, is the warm calm in the eye of the storm. The reprieve. Here, folks have space to survive. And we do, we survive – against you. We survive, because what else is there?

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.

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.

You’re so strong. You’re so strong! Look at how strong you are! What I never imagined is how much I would have liked to have remained soft.

‘Poetry is sometimes a no’