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Case. Fireworks. Metaphorically always, here problematically literal, but we are fine, extraordinary, painfully alive as we always are (so far) (so good). I imagine you on fire and churn – visibly? No. I am (barely) under control, I am the way the stitches in your jumper knit together and your skirt teases the top of your knee, your boots clunk when you walk and I will walk into the sound and nest there. Sound meets sound: you slam the door and wait for me to look. I don’t look. Hearing you move is already more than I can stand.
‘No, listen, Sherlock –‘
– which is me. Obviously. Obvious to you because you haven’t considered it and to me because I have, because I know that the name and the thing are one and the same since our minds (even mine) are moulded this way by our world (go smaller) our genes (go smaller) by the way the atoms the quarks the matter we cannot name [understand] (and go smaller but beneath that there is only nothing [only the word for nothing]). We don’t understand anything, at least I understand this much, but that’s all – no listen, the movement of a mouth around a name and the movement of the hand shaping the ink that shapes the name are all the same, and I say your name, your names, the meaning of your names and when I say it my tongue and my tastebuds and my larynx and my breath and your name and your body and your self are the same ––
– and there’s a moment I can almost believe this, that our hopeless reliance on language could fuse us, as if your bones which aren’t mine and your blood which isn’t mine and your words made of sounds I can’t precisely imitate did not form a hole exactly the size of the universe between us.
‘ – waltz out without me –‘
(I never, I’d never, but I do all the time of course. You think I don’t listen because I don’t hear every word you say but I hear words underneath words, words underneath your skin. I know this is of little use to you. I know you would be moved if you knew and afraid and confused, I know you’d be no less angry that I don’t hear your mouth-words sound-words vibration-words, the words you choose. Which seems fair. Which hurts. Which hurts you most, I know, I see/observe, I know and that helps you not at all, I know.)
It’s extraordinary this unmooring from my body you render me at a loss, you render me hereer than I ever am and yet – what I mean is I am here so trapped in my body in the heat of your skin this close yet everything else my body touches is as far as it has ever been – what I mean is I know what I’m seeing I know the textures of this room and every detail – so it’s not not seeing, not even not observing. But that was always what mattered, this interaction of brain and world and transport, this stream of data. I have never been a hollow universe inside my skin like this. I have never felt myself seeing out of the dark behind my eyes, I have never been so aware of the air against my flesh of how much about it I cannot
what are you doing
blankness. What is this? You are you wouldn’t this doesn’t
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It is overwhelmingly good, I suppose is what it is, once the words come back that is what they say. There is data too but it is of little use. You are still angry – or no, you’re frustrated, you’re oh – but your lips are soft, soft like a stone worn smooth you are unkind to your mouth I see you rubbing it with your tongue and want want and this was what I wanted or part of it and now – oh – this is useless data, this is meaningless, this is texture and tension and tells me nothing about why I should feel so surrounded by my body why my skin should light like this.
(there’s no understanding without language no shape to the world without containers of words but – I could say you obliterate the white noise softens around me but does metaphor help or make it worse, mostly I honestly can’t tell, it reshapes the shapes and the spaces between them a thousand ways and maybe that helps but maybe I brush them aside and the world hurts more for being made of atoms again after all – no idea – no way of discerning when this, this –)
And as you kiss me my thoughts go down they are clouds around your breasts touching each moment of your skin they are on your stomach your thighs they curl across your clit they are entering your – oh, but where, how do I – is it porn is it men is it the whole rotted/rotting fabric of things is it history – you and I and your body which I need which I dream of figuratively/literally (constantly) – and here I am with no words – this place I’d kiss and kiss is it your pussy [a cat/a slur/a thing to get wet/ to penetrate/ to take pleasure from (to pleasure in return?)/a thing] a thing of course it’s not a thing not an it when it’s you, a part is a part of the whole is a whole and I will not call it a hole as though it’s a gap in the world, an absence and not a you, alive and wanting. What then? Space worse than hole, folds or any word that is less solid and real than you I will not take, I will not take vagina (the sound of the word doesn’t rhyme with the sound of your name the way it sounds in my head), will I take cunt since it’s better than the rest, something of the surety of all this in that word, but you’ve called Anderson a cunt, and your body warm and wanting me is not your voice raised in anger. Or is it? Because you’re you and it’s all the same, but that doesn’t make the almost-arbitrary classification of you into pieces an irrelevance, because you are each piece but you are also the places those pieces fit together and the places they don’t quite the jaggeds the edges the scar tissue the layer upon layer of memory gluing it clumsily, do you have any idea, your loveliness incomprehensible even to me how little of it you must see how the place where your blood moves from capillary to vein is lightless but the brightest place on earth. Oh, give me words give me anything, give me your tongue in my mouth tracing the word the world won’t offer up against mine, spell it out in the way our tongues curl against each other, there, that’s it, that’s what I’ll touch kiss want, that shape there exactly and the sound you made.
John I say, and you are tense at my skin, you are thrilled. No one else calls you this, no one takes the name you were handed and cuts it up to fit it better against your eardrums your letterbox texts slung minute by hour into your phone. That this is your name is obvious to me and no one else which suits me fine, because the name is the body is the mind and none of those yours are mine but more mine than anyone’s for as long as I alone know the right shape for the vessel our minds require to hold a concept in. Not that I could ever or have ever managed to hold you in, but John, the trying, the trying is –
‘You actually want this –‘
Wonder. Surprise. It’s obvious, isn’t it, wasn’t it? There were so many days I thought it would leak from every damn pore in my body, but there’s lots you don’t see, a focus I never even thought to dream of, you don’t work every second to keep the fabric of things from unravelling in your head, and that leaves you free to see solidly the places to hurt and the places to heal are always the same and you know the names for all of them can hold them in your head and who needs anything else when you work your fingers into the membrane between the living and death and let me watch you do it?
There are some things I read on you that I’d almost rather be rid of (the almost is obvious I hope, I’d never wipe these things from my mind any more than I’d ever really leave you behind in a way that was real, not a taxi or a fall, those things didn’t count on my end but they counted and counted and counted on yours, I know and I know that doesn’t help) – touches and joking and you, you underrated, they had no idea, you will never know how brave I think you are when I stopped wearing skirts at seventeen. I never missed them, but you would have missed them and so you chose not to miss them, you, John, with your brave snapped-open name that no one but me knows to use, and your boots and your bullets and I never knew the content of a person could seep beyond the words for them but your smile and your skirts and your clenched shaking fists are braver than the word for bravery and there is nothing I can do about that.
Listen, you have to listen because I’m losing track now, the border I’ve maintained so carefully between here and there is breaking, how much of this are you hearing? You were never meant to hear any of it.
I could say that I love you. I could snarl it, I could follow it with obviously. I could make it all your fault for not seeing. But it should have been obvious, the things I’ve done, you said madwoman when you met me or wrote it but I am so much madder now –
‘The things I’ve done for you, Sherlock –‘
What are you saying? Hard to know when your lips are on me again, I am a body again, I am transport in transports I am transported and have no idea where. You hardly need to list what you’ve done for me, I wear it over my bones, I dream and redream it.
‘By your own logic,’ you say, how much of this are you hearing – but don’t let me think, don’t stop kissing me –
‘Obviously,’ you say, and then I know what you said before that, and I know how much you heard.
I swallow. I try to retain dignity, conscious thought, anything will do. I try not to think about obviously or Sussex or fucking you.
‘Sherlock?’ you say.
I kiss you [you are your forehead]. I kiss you [you are your neck]. I kiss you [you are your shoulders and your hair and your tongue.]
You need to hear it. I can manage the last bit at least. I am shaking with something, laughter maybe, maybe not. I love you. ‘Obviously,’ I say, pressing close and closer. ‘Obviously.’
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