I don’t know what it was that made me so in love with you. I think I liked the way you ate. There is some part of me that a shared childhood didn’t deposit into my brother, and you always lamented being an only child, but you were that part. You put walnut ice cream in my coffee because you drink yours black and didn’t have any milk. Your inside was far away from your outside in a way that made it seem very close to me, like the underside of water. I have had many soulmates and I don’t mind now whether I exist, so something else, soulponds. I loved to sit by you and watch your surface ripple in the wind. I loved to sink just my hands into the knuckle-cooling water and lift the floating plants from below and look at the dripping roots. I never think about whether the world loves me back. It’s hardly important, everything is recursive, love isn’t an action gifted or received, it’s a self-evidence allowed to exist. You made food resistanceless: I didn’t know one could cook without following or having memorised a recipe, and then I watched you whittle apart a squash and neglect it with butter in a beat-up teflon pan until the rice was done, and it was that easy. I don’t like food but I did next to you. We drank tea with honey and vanilla extract and I went home and bought it the next day and it was just flavours in my mouth again, instead of in my brain, as it had been. I put walnut ice cream in my coffee and it just tasted flatly sweet, foamy. You have always had a gravity in my world, made of solid wood, real and touchable. I remember always the texture of your wool sweater over skin, the smell of your perfume on it, the density of your cool sleek hair boxing in my fingers on your scalp. You exist in some perfectly severed slice of reality, the solid parts without the overfast parts. We are strangers now, but so is the wooden bench in my childhood courtyard, and the crunching gravel beneath that, and the orange-stained sandbox with it’s foldable seat-lid and the swingset that some of the kids in the neighbouring apartment buildings used too, items I watched my dad put down and build up for me, and later my brother when he got old enough to enjoy eating sand. I grew up in a way where doing things was heavy and hard and not doing things was easier than having to do them right, I had to keep my limbs inside the vehicle at all times, and I became so tired I went completely still and then disappeared into nothing. You showed me that walking was as easy as moving when I was fifteen, (that things don’t have to come hurtling toward your arms when they extend,) and now I’ve almost learned how to. I once (last month) said I liked being called this sound and the woman told me of course you do, it’s your name. It was the first time I learned I had one. The second time was when I let the lump in my throat or entire body get me and the psychologist said that sound to me with so much compassion that I suddenly understood that the sound was me. Some day I will be a person, just like you, I’ll run so far the world will have no choice but to admit I’m here more than air. At some point in my teens my brother and I stopped speaking and now he is an adult too, right in silent front of me. We are all, everyone, in the same woods. Everyone I have been next to is somewhere, which is only still next to me with more or less space. Do you see?
