A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

she eats fish because she likes to think the whole ocean then exists inside of her, like she’s got scales for skin.

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.

That I have no home. That I loved my best friend and now I might die.

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.

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.

we know all too well the sickening glee these pigs feel when they steal our matriarchs.

I already want to follow him, into the forest, wherever he wants to go. I want to wander and meander with him. I want to take time, to be together slowly, because I want this bloom to last forever.

This is how I will tell the story of falling in love with a novelist before he became one.

I realise, learning is a process of untangling. Because he tugs on a string and the tight fabric of everything I thought I knew unravels.

feel already the grand beginning of everything beyond. It swells my body like I am rolling clouds, like I am wood submerged in river water. I smile. And then she is gone.

And in this paper-thin pocket of glorious now, I think, we could be anywhere. As if, beyond our passionfruit vines, a rocky cliff might descend all the way down to a sparkling Mediterranean Sea.

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

We keep protesting and all people see is our rage, but I want them to see this!

This is what I’m talking about! Our JOY!

look at our family. Look at our joy, our glorious, glorious joy. It’s fucking radiating and all I want is for the world to see that I am bursting in love!

then I see her and I feel my skin become the thinnest membrane, as if waves of sea foam might breach my flesh and roll out through my chest.

Amongst the gore and the grossness, she kisses me like I am God. Like I am sacred. 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. Or at least, she is that for me.

a name is just a sound people make with their mouths that we learn to respond to.

Then she says, the psychotherapist said, Lucette is in love with Suzanne, and if you don’t let them be together, I fear that she may die…

when Claude and Marcel were living in Nazi-occupied Jersey, they created art with the intention of inspiring dissent among the soldiers. How they punctured and subverted Nazi propaganda pamphlets through collages and word games, and I will feel ripe with potential for what we could create.

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

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,

she tells me that fucking me is like painting the underside of my flesh. A painting that only we bear witness to.

What I’m good at is picking at and teasing apart sentences, extrapolating, like a miner sieving earth for gold. I’m good at meaning making.

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.

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

so often I have felt that futurity does not belong to me, that I am bound to the present, unable to imagine a beyond in which I want to live, but here she is, Caragh, becoming my open future.

Above us, a flock of birds swells and contracts, taking shape and then dispersing. There must be a word for that, she says, pointing to the sky. There is, I say, it’s a murmuration. Caragh says it slowly back to me, murmuration, letting the word roll gently off her tongue. That might just be my favourite word, she

When he touches me, I feel like I am being turned inside out, like he’s writing on the underside of my flesh. A private story that only we read.

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.

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.

Someone listens, and they cast a spell to transform her into a laurel tree. And as she sinks her roots, she takes the shape of something else. A different body, yes, but it is a body she can live in, where she can grow and flower and blossom. A body that is hers…

Don’t be afraid of her love, because it’s not going to obliterate you. She is here to bear witness. And she knows she can’t do that if you don’t let her learn who you are.

I see a flock of birds flying high above, against a creamy sky. They bend and swerve, swelling and contracting. That’s called a murmuration, he says. It’s a sign. A good one? He hugs me. Yeah, love, he says, a good one.

Because she is her own person, no longer the subject of my reflection, but the sovereign of her own sea. And in recognising her borders, I feel the distance between our bodies shrinking. Like we are made whole through our slippages. Our own people at the same time we spill into each other.

Stuff seeps through the walls of time. And from within this inch-wide pocket of now, we slip in and out. Into the before and out into the after.

This is how it feels to love you, to feel like the present is slippery, like we’ve been here before, over and over and over again. Because I kiss you, and it is, at once, a mere moment and an eon.

if no one ever disagrees with you, Thomas, your next story will be new characters sitting in a new room discussing the same ideas you wrote about in your last one.

When people are constantly asking you where you’re from, she says, the assertion they’re making is that you are not from here. I guess I’ve never had to think about it like that before, I admit. No one has ever asked me where I’m from. You want to be a publisher, she says, you need to think about lives that aren’t your own.

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.

Because the good things have been beaten small. We make the good things feel big, so big that she becomes swollen, too, with goodness. So that her heart feels heavy, not with hate, but with bright pink love.

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.

And so, I close my eyes and swallow hiraeth, feel its longing in my throat, feel its ache in my belly, and wonder, what will a writer say to his lover of love and pain, in the soft absence of a word?

We can’t yet see that this ghost story will become a story of ghosts.

Are you okay? she asks. I shake my head and tell her, I just keep thinking…even if we were to live to one hundred, that still feels like such a grossly inadequate amount of time. Caragh kisses me on the mouth. I think we are lucky, she says, to feel like there isn’t enough time.

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.

I will find you, in this wide river in the sky, and we will dance and swim

People don’t need to be righteous in order to be respected, she says.

You have taught me that failing is part of the process of making art, and that life is our greatest work. When I arrive at the end of this making, I know that I will be holding the most beautiful artwork, because of you.

I imagine that this wind has travelled from the end of the earth where glacier-green ice, at the moment of her death, spectacularly cracked, broke off and became part of the sea. I imagine the voluptuous surrender of ice to ocean – an entire continent sacrificing its edge for our Daphne.