- CS Lewis

Here, now, at a hotel bar. The transience of this place, a living in the moment when the rest of your life carries on outside. Talking through the wine, a gentle teasing, discussing hot-headed reactions and how the battles of two people are so finely played. Trying on friendship, letting it settle on the skin – this is your new thing. As lovers the relationship was a series of ellipsis, a trailing off when words were required. And now a chance to finish your sentences, to speak in the honest and open way of allies. You have put down your swords.

The room glows amber as you raise your glass to this new found alliance. You are friends. You are feeling your way and you are careful not to touch (though your knees list starboard).

“Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”

- CS Lewis

You want to understand his views on God and family. “What did your mother teach you?” … “Do you fight with your wife?” … “Is being a dad what you thought it would be?” … endless and earnest words flowing… “Venus came up out of the ocean, you know … and the problem with religion is it tells us men and women are fundamentally different, and don’t you want to fuck your equal?” … “See, I’m not the same as you but I’m trying to understand a little” … “Can I see a picture of-” … “How many times do you-” …

(Endless and earnest, yes – though some, still, are hard to say out loud).

He answers carefully, aware of this fragile accord. You are friends. You listen with a frozen smile. As lovers, you would have stopped his mouth.

Because the real question, the one that aches, comes last. You tell him you don’t have a ballast. An essential truth about who you are together.

“Tell me please” you ask, and the smile liquefies, “Tell me when you were most true with me?”

His answer is in moments like this, just sitting at a hotel bar together. It is all right here. And the physical, the times you leave the bar and move upstairs – it is just a manifestation of this feeling. This travelling down the same secret road. Two friends, side by side. Absorbed in each other.

And it’s lightening quick. Acknowledging the confluence of friends and lovers, before he orders his last glass.

You ask him to drink slowly. He assures that you will see each other in this way again. You say “grazie destino” but you are lying, because it will never be enough to meet at a hotel bar and drink slowly these one or three with a friend.

Who used to be your lover and moves upstairs, alone.

***

This isn’t fiction. Sometimes you just feel like telling the truth. When I first posted this, I left out the last line from the original piece, how it’s a lonely walk home when you don’t have anger at your side. I remember that walk, and how it wasn’t the last one I took with this man. Some lessons take much, much longer to learn …

I put my hand to his lips, his voice has been rising and I don’t need a string of expletives to wake Ollie up.

It’s okay Joe I say but it isn’t, because my fingertip pulses when I touch him and suddenly, inexplicably, I imagine placing it in his mouth. A flush rises up my neck at the thought and I press my thumb hard against my finger in an attempt to focus on something, anything other than what just happened.

It’s perfectly normal. I tell myself this over and over after Joe shuffles home, after his boyish grin takes my breath away when he waves goodbye from the driveway. When he kissed my cheek as he was leaving I could smell the sharp mint of vodka on his breath, and a smoky remnant of cologne that settled on my skin. It’s hormones, it’s just pregnancy hormones making me tune in to this frequency, suddenly, inexplicably. And he looks enough like you, just enough that I’m obviously mixing up the signals, crossing and jumping wires in my head. That has to be it. It can’t be anything more. This is Joe, your Joe, my Joe. The white knight of this tragedy.

I want him to come back. Ah, fuck. It has to be the hormones.

I lay in bed with his smell on my lip, the way his scent feels like a hand at my neck. I run my own down and over my full breasts, these little hills of flesh that have taken on a life of their own these days. They ache from the centre out when I run my fingers across them, but I am used to this now, the fine line between pain and pleasure. My body traffics both, growing this child of ours, and doing it without you.

Joe. The first man I have touched who isn’t you. The thrill of it does not escape me tonight, laying here with my hands resting under my belly. I will allow myself the thoughts that have crested in, I will let them wash over me because it’s just hormones, and I’m lonely and he looks enough like you for this to be okay.

I have not thought of sex since you died. And yet I have been saturated in it all the same. Your affair, it permeates my life, it settles over my sleep and flares throughout the day. I have re-read those emails a hundred times these past few weeks, it is like I have my hands on one of those illicit novels we used to pass around in school, only this time I’m in it somehow, it’s my own story too even when I only appear as narration.

I am jealous of you Ben. I am angry and jealous of your second life, lived so fully and successfully on the side. Did it feel like that, the first time? Did your finger pulse when you first touched her, the way mine turned to an electric current tonight? Did you back away like I did, but feel it just the same? That inexplicable something, the realization that there is another layer under the skin – for everybody. Are we all just waiting our turn to betray? Have we betrayed ourselves first by settling for only one kind of love when there are other worlds waiting to open up? Fuck. I don’t want to understand this. I don’t want to see how easy it could be.

How long before you pursued it, this something? Did you fight it, or did you lay in bed next to me and roll the memory between your fingers, did you play it out across your skin the way I am now? I have my hand between my legs, it is the first time I have done this in years. The sin of it sits tight in my chest and throat, yet the heat feels like some kind of preparation as my fingers move in slow circles and I close my eyes against their pattern. Is that what happened, Ben? Did you solidify the experience by coming against an image of her face, did this imprint on your brain so that one little spark turned into an explosion and you were there burning away at its centre? I can see Joe’s face now as the waves begin, I have my hand on his lip and it isn’t you as my orgasm is wrenched out of me. I do not even bother to stifle the guttural cry that comes up out of me. My body has betrayed me for the first time in my life and I feel a kind of triumphant terror as my eyes re-adjust to the dark.

It is just the hormones. I am flush with pregnancy hormones. It is nothing else and it is not an understanding. I do not understand what you did, Ben. I do not forgive what you did. We are not the same.

A certain calm settles over me when my breathing finally slows. It is as if I have dived into the ocean, the way the shock of what I did gives over to a yielding, to a silk-like feeling of surrender.

I used to love opening my eyes under water, searching through the deep. I liked to swim away from the sureness of the world, out into the endlessness awaiting. I never looked back to the shallows where feet churned sand and bodies broke the surface. I would hold my breath and swim out as far as I could go before the tug of fear pulled me back. The endless blue sometimes felt safer than the shore.

This kind of calm, it is a return to that feeling. A remembering of how to swim out and away, to fix my eyes on a limitless unknown. You are behind me, Ben. I sense the turbid waters you have created, the way you thrash against the waves. You struggled against this safety so long you inevitably went down with the ship, Ben. I see now what happens when you don’t take that breath, when you won’t dive under. So many people drown in the shallows because they are afraid of the deep. Why did you never once swim out to where I was waiting Ben?

We are not the same. Now I know we are not the same. I was always going to love you better. Your best offering – your wedding dance, your earnest vows, your dedication – that is how I did it every day. And I would have loved you in this way forever – it is easy enough when you do not fear it. That is my love, and that is not how you did it. It is my swimming into the depths whilst you broke against the shore.

I am not the same as you, Ben. This certain calm reminds me. I will send Jane a card tomorrow, a thank you for all of the love and support her family has given us since your passing. I will gently remind her to love her husband because he is a good man. And I will never, ever think of this night again.

****

A little more of Anna’s story to share today. Thanks as ever for reading these drafts! 

The other is to get it  - George Bernard Shaw 

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. You have thought often of these fish and their bicycles. How the idea of needing a man is just as curious. It is this way from the start – just ask your barbies and Laura Holt. Anything boys can do, you like to do it better.

(As a necessity it just never strikes you to equate men with air. And you never could ride a bike).

But want is something else entirely. Want, that director of desire, takes up residence well before you can name it. Your early poems hint at this something sleeping within, a dormancy more dangerous than need. Your body can barely contain it as you begin to strain at your seams.

You are 14 when the first breach occurs. A particular scene in a particular film. The way two characters make love. It stops you in your tracks. With a white hot clarity you think – I want to do that. You rewind the scene a dozen times. Your chest blazes and your heart pulses in your finger tips as you study the limbs and skin and sweat on-screen. It leaves you blinking in the light and quietly sure that you want nothing less than this from Jeff Bridges men.

With that quiet sureness you wait. Any time a skinny boy with grass on his knees comes near you push him away. Sex will not be an education. You want to greet it fully formed. You will know when you see it, and indeed years later the recognition is instant. This boy on the cusp with no grass staining his knees. He wears an earnest love of women on his sleeve and builds you a grotto on a laundry room floor.

When you lay down with him the sheer joy of it makes you laugh out loud. Later you scrawl in your diary that you cannot erase the feeling of his strong arms, and of laughing. You fall in love with the feeling of wanting more.

(You edit out the finer details however. You do not mention the girlfriend, how your secret glows up out of you but you are not allowed to say a word. He is the first man you will lie for. The first lesson in how little people see when they decide to look the other way).

When this boy leaves town your heart contracts once, hard and painful, but brief. You carry no weight of loss. Just the memory of strong arms and laughing out loud. He has taught you in secret the lightness of love. Un souvenir léger in the swing of your hips.

The next man is just a little famous. He buys your friends drinks and snorts coke in a bathroom bigger than your apartment. It makes you giddy, but he drinks three to your one, and when you spend the night your bodies tangle but never connect. He tells you with the ego of someone who is just a little famous that the fault lies with you. Alone, awake, you test his theory and experience a revelation. Your first ever orgasm, to spite, while he snores. As the sudden shift of settled rocks floods to your limits you have to bite down on his pillow till the tide recedes.

(In the morning you are ferocious in your gratitude. He is confused by your ardour and though you never see him again, you think often of this man who is just a little famous. The one who led you to the best sex you never had.)

And now you get back to the business of want. It hits you in the stomach when you meet this next. Your mind is turned, it splutters and starts like an old movie projector every time he enters the room. This bohemian boy in shorts and a tie. You spend a hundred hours trying to capture him through your pen. Forests of words in his honour, a treatise on longing. And you literally slide down the wall when he tells you I’m gay.

But he teaches you, this man, to trust your instinct. When you get up off the floor he will become a great love of your life. You will live together in domestic bliss on a busy street and fill your house with Buffy re-runs and cheap red wine. You will spend many a night in his arms and he will be the one to say just write. He will call you New Years Eve to remind you to forget perfect, and he will never trust your crooked smile. He is your first experience of love as being known.

Then comes your Finch-Hatton. The man they say you conjured as if you had written him yourself. You are covered in red dust when you meet and this time you welcome the grass on his knees. This earthly man when you are air. You still believe in stars then, underneath an African sky. On a continent that lodges under your nails, where changing the world is changing each other. This, then, becomes your fine romance. A man washing your hair on the banks of the Mara. When he tells you he loves you the mosquitoes hum.

You survive a full year on the memory of this. But in the city your fucks become urban. Until one day Africa recedes so far he hands her back with your keys. Stilnox and bathwater carry you through the hazy weeks that follow as you slip under to silence the humming. From this man you will learn how to climb back out. But for a while the under-tow pulls you down. (You will dream of red dust for years).

It is in the wounding that you meet the one. A man with slate eyes who has a low tolerance for alcohol and your flesh. He will shuck you from your skin, this man, shake you loose and leave you scrambling for the pieces. Everything you have ever learned recedes in the glare of his gold band. And you will spend years riding your freedom with the curb of this bit.

As his sign flickers on and off you will measure your days by his vacancy illuminated. Your greatest love will be your greatest folly and you will revel in the farce.

(Funny that ‘mistress’ means having authority, heading a house. A woman who has the power of controlling or disposing of something at her own pleasure).

As long as she never needs.

And what did I get for it? I never weighed what I gave for what I got  - Walt Whitman

Eidyia’s note: I wrote this over a year ago and it is funny to me now that I was always writing toward you as the conclusion. I was obviously too close at the time to see that you, too, are merely a chapter in this story of the best things I never had.

The truth is our most precious things are not meant to be held, no matter how tightly we clasp at them. We lose the things we think we cannot lose, we survive when we are sure we will drown. Because we are meant to go on. We are still here, the ones who have been left behind. And we will laugh again, eventually. We will feel excitement and desire and hope again – eventually. Life does come back. But make no mistake here. We are never, ever the same, those of us who have lost what we loved. There belongs to us now the deepest sadness, a soul-sadness that cannot be reached or soothed or repaired. Something is dimmed in the ones who survive.

Make no mistake here. We are never, ever the same. But it is what you do with these changes that defines you.

Ephesians 4:31-32

“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”

It is not what Mike Keegan has in mind. I fold the statement into the smallest of squares and place it in my husband’s bedside drawer. The bottom one, next to his red shirt and a book he was once given by a woman who loved him, perhaps as much as I did. We must do right in this world. We must take care of each other. We must take care of what we have. And we must try to understand when the time comes for us to let go.

***

Eidyia’s note: Coming to the end of Anna’s story. Thoughtful, deep-water Anna whose lessons have in so many ways turned out to be my own. Thank you as ever for reading body, remember.

Le Papillon – Picasso

**

You, so defined by absence, are always present in this. The ritual of it, fingers sliding down over the belly, the pretence of hesitation – it is all an invitation. I close my eyes and my fingers draw you out of the darkness in a steady rhythm until you appear. It is early morning now. Outside there are clarion skies. The light sits on the tip of my tongue, I press it against my teeth and it bursts in my mouth with a sudden yellow. The glow intensifies and now I taste the colour orange. It rolls across my tongue, the flavour of unfettered sunlight, filling my mouth with a burnt sweetness.

As I arch my back vivid green bolts down my spine. The light behind my eyes changes, I am soaked in the deep wine of cool, hard precision, the focus of breath and blood and nerve. Water fills my ears, it spills over and soaks my skin. There is salt on my lip and I try to lock in on those slate eyes but I am holding on to something that wants me to let go.

I lose you in a fusion of colour, I am incandescent and I cry out your name in the white-hot glow. You disappear behind my eyes and the world goes back to black.

I have to keep my eyes squeezed shut to stop the tears. This is all that has survived, and the sadness that settles over me breaks apart my still pounding heart.

The desire has not waned, no matter how many pages have turned.

I want to kiss you here.

I forget everything I know but my body remembers. Impossible, we have not done this before. And yet. There is the inexplicable feeling of return when you cause a thousand nerves to jump and collide. You kneel before me, make of me a temple and with each stroke the tenuous chain gives a little more, it breaks apart with every oh god that rises up against it. I bare my teeth at you, a snarl that wants to catch your flesh and taste your salt on my tongue. Whatever bound us to the rest of our lives shatters in the explosion that ensues. Our landscape forever alters and you map it as I come.

I will come to covet your body with the intensity of one who borrows and must give back. This is a constant reaching, a constant touch. There is a need for tactile reassurance that overpowers my borders and my limits. You have a wall around you – what was that they said? With you I smash this wall myself, frantic, fingers pulling at any barrier between us. God, I can never get close enough. I bite and scratch and wrap my arms and legs around you. I tell you that you are mine. I invoke possession as the law.

I draw roads and rivers across your skin. I landmark our bodies, a topography laid down through the trace of thumb, the pressing of palms. Territories are charted with mouths and hands. You learn of my heights and my depth, you discover the part of me that resides below sea level, and the parts that contain the highest of mountains. Against the terrain of your body I spend nights raising indelible flags to mark places I too can claim. I was here this kiss states. I was here this sliding of my hand declares. I was here this touch of tongue to nerve blazes.

It would seem those who aim to conquer are desperate to be known. Even when the map disintegrates and we can no longer find our way back we keep on trying to make our claim. We mapped our world so quickly, Mack. Why did we never give any thought to how it might be destroyed?

This is a work of fiction. And yet …

I said there would come a time. Remember? When it was all about little words, and I said the saddest three were waiting. How I knew we’d get to them, eventually.

And still, that question asked. Do you remember? Tell me that you remember. Tell me that you and I survived the night, that you miss me too because you remember. Even if it’s only in dreams, I pray that you remember.

(I never – not for one single day - forget)

This targeting of Aboriginal language was part of a systematic and enforced assimilation, a white-out of the oldest continuous culture on our earth. It began when colonists first put their boots on Australian soil, and continued right through the twilight of our last century. It took less than 200 years to disassemble the oldest continuous culture on our earth. A speck of time, a flash across the night sky compared to the 50,000 or more years Aboriginal Australians survived and thrived on this land.

They incarcerated the language. This affects me more than any other revelation today.

Language is oxygen to a culture. It is the trade wind on which wisdom is carried, it ensures stories survive the fire and live on. It is both the glowing ember and the flame that flares – for the individual and the greater community it is how you say I love you. How you say I don’t. It is how you play, tease, cajole. How you warn, and how you rage. It is your myth and your lesson, it is how you declare war, and equally, how you offer peace. It is how you express who you are – and how you know where you have been.

To silence language is to sever the spiritual tongue. It is to disorient one’s place in space and time, to reduce all communication to a rudimentary commentary on the here and now. It is fundamentally designed to ground the speaker in the immediate – to censor the whisper of ancestors, and to suppress the shouts and cries of one’s children.

The children. They kept taking the children, and no-one could speak of it. For the first time I realise just how calculated and methodic Australians were in their approach. How they declared this continent Terra Nullius – unowned, unoccupied – upon their arrival, and across two centuries worked backwards to make it the truth. They re-wrote history, redacted an entire people to make it so. Children, communities, and entire ecosystems were sacrificed to validate one of the greatest lies ever told. A lie so big the reverberations can still be felt in 2013, where time is marked against an arbitrary date in 1788. To be a nation in possession of the world’s oldest stories, and to start the clock here – this I cannot understand.

Today I would not even know that there are bones under my feet, but for the stories that have been fierce enough to survive.

Because they have survived, somehow. For all that has been lost there is a thread that sings one back through time, a thread you can follow on the guitar string and the mournful notes at a gathering like ours tonight. When the language is shared around the fire in this way, it vibrates. You can feel it come up through the soil where your toes dig in, you can sense it in the sentinel stars. They, who have been our story keepers for longer than time.

I believe the stars themselves sang out when as a nation we said sorry. The truth had been waiting a long time to be told.

Last week my company, the aptly named SEEK, took a group of us on an extraordinary journey, a Welcome to Country where we spent two days and nights with the Gunditjmara people of Warrnambool on the south-west coast of Victoria. For my colleagues and I it was a moving and revealing experience and I for one came away with many heart bruises. I was particularly affected by the idea of Aboriginal languages being destroyed; we learnt that it was a major practices of colonists to stop Aboriginal people speaking their own languages and I could not stop thinking about how much was lost with this calculated linguicide.

I would like to dedicate this elegy to Amy who showed me the constellations, who knows of a lake where her people used to look down to see the stars. “The keepers of our stories” she told me before we returned to the fire.

I do not cry for you in this way until this day has passed. I stare straight ahead, unblinking, all afternoon.

I want to keep this evidence of your stick-figure ‘g’ and the slash of your ‘t’, the way your hand delivers characters that force the eye to squint to reveal their meaning.

The way you write I love you in the tiniest of letters has always moved me.