2
For one winter, you were all there was. You and the room you lived in. I read an article about the study of pattern languages. Complex rules that govern complex systems. I started to see them everywhere in your room. The bottles on your dresser, the dishes stacked by your door, the nearly identical white shirts, hanging in a row. I saw you as a pattern language, repeating yourself over and over. Cups of tea always drank the same way; pour a little out, never quite finish it. Re-watching the same television shows. I’ll be there for you, because you’re there for me too.
I’ve counted the ways I tried to come back to you. The way you pierced holes in the stems of the tulips. Someone told you that it makes them live longer. They died anyway. How everything in your life smelled of cigarettes, lavender and fabric softener, all at once. The time you wrapped a single dumpling in a napkin and passed it to me across a sticky restaurant table. ‘For later’, you told me. We walked home that night and stopped to buy single cigarettes from the Chinese convenience store. $1.50 in cash or $1.70 on card. We got high and fucked before falling asleep with the window open and the heater on. You said you knew it was fucked up, but you couldn’t help how much you loved it.
In the end, we were like the tulips; beautiful, finite. Now we’re the past-tense – was, were – and there’s a line, carefully drawn, through you and me. You tell me I can’t exist for you, so I draw a line through me as well, pencil in my non-existence. Default settings on an iPhone have it programmed to delete text messages after one year. I learn this too late and now our messages, the traces of us, don’t exist either. Given the choice, I don’t know if I could have kept them anyway.
I still listen to the music that was yours, all of the songs that you gave me. It’s the only way I have something that is still ours.
3
The summer that followed you was filled by absence. It was exactly like you said it would be: that the nothing, the act of not being, can have a presence too. The sky expands on and on and on when the weather is good – it’s just another kind of nothing. That nothing asks to be filled, asks for the porous aftermath of one relationship to be plastered over with the hopeful start of another. I fill the nothing and fill myself with other people, the repeated rhythm of one lover moving through another. A new skin against mine, a new sequence of signals to misunderstand.
We don’t use punctuation anymore, only words that puncture. I get the text at 11PM that asks me what I’m doing. I think I’ve waited my whole life to feel this disposable to someone. We are all sinking our teeth into different motifs just to say the same thing: let’s talk about sex, baby. We drink beers in the bath, touch, kiss, go out and come home again, this time with someone new. I’ll spend a few days thinking it matters and the rest of my life knowing it doesn’t. There’s nothing more freeing than realising that everyone is pretending.
In time, I start to think I’m falling in love again. I can’t tell if it’s real or if it’s like the sky (nothing). He tells me he’s incapable of love, then turns around and says, ‘I love you’. We’re all surrounding ourselves with half loves and hoping the fractured fractions will add up to something more.
I watch the banks of the river give way following a week of rain. Warm storms, hot nights. I couldn’t wait to get home and clean my skin.
1
In the last hot days, I walk to return to myself. The world moves on because I move through it. I think who I am might be lost in the details of who everyone else is, that I’m only myself in the things that occur to me about others. I fixate on the woman on my tram, whose bruises I can see through her stockings: a perfect purple hue. I watch a man, his face painted with his own drying blood, stop to fix his hair in the window of a nail salon. He combs his fingers through it–one, two, three times–and continues walking.
I walk home late at night even though it’s not safe anymore (it never was). I buy an orange juice at the petrol station. It tastes like plastic and reminds me of airports, airports that remind me of home (absence of), home that reminds me of coming and going (back to, away from: you). I think a lot about love. Love: will tear us apart; will keep us together; is a battlefield; is a stranger; is like an itching in my heart. I think of love as a catastrophe, as an empty house that nobody lives in anymore. I’m more afraid of being loved than of loving and isn’t that the saddest thing?
I’ve lost count of the ways I’ve tried to find myself in someone else. That was how I got lost in the first place. But I still drink my tea the way you make it.
Fin.