A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

You just don’t know that the last time is going to be the last time until it already has been.

Neither of them asks about my before and I begin to understand that in this bar, silences are respected. That there are stories that exist upstairs, outside, that people down here want to repress.

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.

This is our game, of subtle gestures, a language of limbs written like words in sand. We toe the shoreline between rock and ocean, between what you see and what we are underneath,

in the English language at least, men wrote the dictionaries, so they effectively defined and ordered words. And they wrote the stories by which we model how to tell a story. I’m going to research how these women made sentences their own…Because I think there are specific experiences that men will never be able to write about with the same depth of feeling.

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.

the reader’s context…their education, their life experience, their interests, et cetera, will determine the meaning of the work. It’s all relative, and therefore the art itself is fluid, it’s in a constant state of flux, because the meaning of said art changes depending on who is taking it in and what they bring to the reading.

the more myself I’ve been, the more hostile the world around me has become.

People often talk about how what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And I think, sometimes, what doesn’t kill you makes you tired.

To remember is to re-member the dis-membered body, some truth you forgot when you were blown apart. Storytelling is the act of piecing you back together.

it’s a lot, isn’t it? The price we pay for this love.

We know now that AIDS is passed through bodily fluids. We know now that the fucking and the lovemaking and the pleasure chasing is how it spreads. We know now that it gets in through our joy and kills us.

Four decades from now, a disease will sweep across the world, and they will call it a global pandemic, and governments will act and mobilise, and borders will close. The world will be locked down and people will speak of this strange and unprecedented time. Again and again, they will say, this strange and unprecedented time. And for those of us who are still alive, we will say, this is not my first pandemic.

some moments, I’m learning, are meant only to be felt. Some moments are felt so big that language cannot stretch wide enough to include it all.

falling in love, you decide, is falling home. it’s clumsy and awkward, utterly wonderful. you’re so vulnerable in the freefall. there’s so much unlearning. it’s letting go of what you knew and how you used to. surrender to her gravity, to the darkness of her unknown. land there, home.