intimations to a solar eclipse
there are two or three of you now. sometimes even four: ghosts, relics, phantoms, fragments of an era that greets closure with refusal. a spectre is haunting me. what are you?
i asked for your heart but then ate it to cannibalise the vulnerabilities i had spoken out loud in a moment of weakness (love) and spat it back out at your feet—bitter.
in Malay, berhati means to be careful or take care, conveyed in the wake of both real and imagined danger. it is a combination of the root word ‘hati’, which can mean heart, with the prefix ‘ber-’ which, when used to modify a noun, can indicate ‘to have’. to berhati, in many ways, is then not only to be careful but also to have a heart, to use your heart, or to do with your heart.
do you think i have forgotten? it was raining the first morning we spent together. you went out to get us some things for breakfast: two pastries and two bowls of yoghurt with fruit. i don’t like fruit and yoghurt but i didn’t have the heart to tell you because you had sliced up the fruit and put it together and i found the gesture so tender, i didn’t have the heart.
my head is under the window and sunlight pours into my eyes, turning you into a shadow. you tell me i am beautiful and i know you mean it because you look almost disbelieving when you say it, like you cannot fathom what is in front of you—what is yours. later, an eyelash falls onto your cheek and i pick it up with my finger, giving it to you for a wish. you tell me i can have it instead and when you ask me what i’ve wished for i say something trite and callous to which you say, eyes smiling, ‘i would’ve wished for you and me to be together forever’.
bring your flowered hair, i have something i need to feel.
freshly washed sheets, anything by the skin of your teeth, rearranging your limbs to accommodate someone else, sweet iced milo, saying yes and being surprised, two magpies in a row, a cold glass of water in between sleep, sitting in the sun by an open body of water, the soft clicking of a keyboard, looking at the moon through a pair of binoculars, leftovers, sunset spilling into the upper deck of the bus that goes across putney bridge, slush that turns your tongue blue, being waited for, heads on shoulders, learning how to float on your back in the sea, do you want to leave at the same time?
in this culture we say goodnight to the moon and eat our pork buns in silence men twirl big questions into their noodles, swallow the pride they cannot chew a bowl sits between us but that is not all you have questions that depend on my appetite
you reappear to me in books or in film: something gorgeous and heartbreaking that touches me deeply and makes me re/consider so much of how i move through the world. i love being told ‘this reminded me of you’ or ‘i thought you would like this’. it remains, to me, one of the most intimate ways of relating to other people. each time i am reintroduced to myself through the lenses of someone else’s perception is an exercise in imagination and wonder; it is a patient, gestative process of allowing myself to be seen and be held as a whole person with longing, desire, fear, anger, stubbornness, empathy. i am always grateful when people thoughtfully and generously place (their) art in my life.
our ritual never changed much: we’d spend a few weeks in each other’s orbits, we’d float apart, and everything in that time and in the coming/going would happen with such ease—like seasons that are inadvertent, unintrusive, never always the same. they come back, with very little announcement, a little different than before but similar enough to be comfortable, recognisable.
(i thought i’d see you around, but you’re dead now) (i think i wanted you dead)
earlier this evening i sat on the grass in the sun and i cried. there are these sudden, random bits of warm luck at the very beginning of autumn that refuse to be depended on, refuse to be seen coming, and when they arrive i hold both my arms out, obliging everything. i cried not necessarily for the summer but for an inexplicable sense of anxiety and foreboding that had been sitting in my chest all day. i wonder if my body is remembering where it was at almost exactly this time last year, if i am always wearing all of my past lives and if they will spend the remainder of my time on this earth running towards me, knocking the breath out of my body.
many years ago in a bar somewhere in Prague i glanced up at the ceiling and saw that someone had written on the wood paneling in black sharpie: you are not where you stay, you are where your love goes. recently i rediscover this in Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat, which is like The Great Gatsby but so much more devastating, and i wonder why i have strayed so far across the world and what it is i am looking for, what it is i am going to find, what is waiting for me here.
the first time we kiss goodbye i say ‘i don’t think we have time’. you smile at me in that way you do, more so in your eyes than in your mouth, and say ‘we have time’.