nathan’s Reviews > A Language of Limbs > Status Update

..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.

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

Sadness, I think, is the object. And grief is the negative space.

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. Grief is not sadness. It is a kaleidoscope of desires. Like white light refracted through skin.

Grief is what if. Grief is endless cycles of why, and I wish I didn’t. Grief is the guilt of the living, of my living. Grief is the sobbing into my birthday cake, because I’m older than you, now. Grief is the building of a world without you in it.

Grief is wanting flesh, yearning for a voice.

is it wrong to be turned on by someone who is dead? 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.

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.

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

‘POETRY IS SOMETIMES a no’