A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

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.

In a world that wishes for our annihilation, here are our bodies, spectacularly colliding.

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. It’s a gay disease, the newspapers say, the radio says, the television says. And all these lovers who just want to be held are made dead by the very thing that makes them feel alive.

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.

Then there’s the less obvious…the part no one writes about. How grief is horny. How I bend myself over the bedhead and feel your fingers in my arse. Real and imagined, grief is pining for your touch. Grief is being wet for a ghost.