A Language of Limbs

by Dylin Hardcastle

Something about numbing the enormity of this pain feels like a disservice to her. Because Daphne was the mother of this house, the hard backbone and the soft, tender front. The woman who transformed in order to survive herself. The woman who made it possible for so many of us to survive. The woman who saved me from myself.

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.

Together, we watch a whole life picked up by a stream of air, carried out into a sea of sky.

thinking about people as echoes, and how the memory of a person rings louder in rooms they’ve slept and loved in.

we are living in the past. Remembering the summers languid and the parties heaving, wishing, always, to return to that beautiful before, the one in which we swam and fucked without fear, the one in which everyone was living and alive.

want to go back, she whispers. And I know exactly what she means, because in this moment, we are met by the brutal realisation that our access to this space, HERE, comes at a cost. Here is hostile and hinged on our silence. Here, they are happy to sell what we have made, so long as we don’t tell anyone where we made it…where it’s from.

I hold her here, for a long time, for hours, for years, a whole life, perhaps, in my arms, breath held. Until, finally, I breathe out and whisper, okay, baby, it’s time for us to go.

Adrenaline fades into blood and the container of my grief disintegrates. Suddenly, I am overflowing. And because this pain is sidesplitting, I start to scream. Whole body shaking, I scream until my throat is ripped raw and nurses rush in to sedate me.

The shock is beginning to wear off. Adrenaline fades into blood and the container of my grief disintegrates. I overflow. And because this pain is sidesplitting, I scream. Whole body shaking, I scream until my throat is ripped raw and nurses rush in to sedate me.

Her death is like a bird slamming into a window. The sudden shock that the sky has limits. That my motherhood was a trick of light.

Her death is like a bird slamming into a window. The sudden shock that the sky has limits. That our liberation was a trick of light.

The snatching of her life before it became one feels unbelievably cruel. My life, as shiny as it was, opalescent like the insides of an oyster shell, is turned over, and everything becomes scaly and sharp.

I am at once overcome by the way the ocean is both everlasting and finite, because as expansive as this water appears, it suddenly dawns on me that all seas have borders.

And now our love is dead and living. Finite and timeless. Heartbreaking and heartbroken. Because my love for you is so alive it flows into the valley of the dead.

And so, I will keep you alive the only way I know how…in my body. By luck and necessity, I met you and you painted on the underside of my flesh. Now I will keep you alive by love, loving you ceaselessly. In every movement of every murmuration.

I fuck the ghost of you and learn that grief is not sadness. Grief is the body cut open, flows of blood and joy and salt and ache and words and memory and memories never made. Grief is undoing.

Grief is the building of a world without you in it.

Grief is not sadness. It is a kaleidoscope of desires. Like white light refracted through skin. Sadness, I think, is the object. And grief is the negative space.

I want to tell you that he’s been charged and sentenced. But there isn’t this sentence to tell. Instead, you were sentenced to death and now your sentence ends in his ongoing and eternal unravelling sentences of free walking greatness.

I learn that if pain is noise in the body, the absence of pain is breathtaking silence.

Death does something to us. It charges us, the still living. It makes our blood thin, so thin and watery that everything feels precarious, like I might bleed out through a paper cut.

The thought of leaving, of walking into new land over the horizon, a place I don’t yet know the shape of, is terrifying, but the water, I have found, carries what I can’t.

Marg is snoring softly, and I am overcome by grief remembering how this was the sound that would usher me back to sleep during my first weeks in this house, when I would wake from a night terror, unable to remember where I was. How her breath was the anchor that settled me.

feel slowly that my world is being inverted, like I’ve been looking at a painting, my entire life, upside down, and now the picture is suddenly clear and fully realised, abstractions taking the shape of bodies, all shiny flesh and limbs entangled. I finish the collection with tears in my eyes, breathless and aching, because here are words. Here is language. I laugh, out loud, at my desk, utterly disarmed by my joy, realising that this whole time, the picture was a portrait of two women, in love.

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.