Talking to the Moon She remembers his veins like tributaries, travelling up the curvature of his neck and emptying into the wells of his rain-coloured eyes. She remembers them pulsating under her skin when they would lay together; creating shapes with the arcs of their bodies so the flow of water would continuously translate between them. She remembers unpacking her body for him in the spaces they shared together — the privacy, the satisfaction of it. Now her body was vacant, a body that missed moisture. He gave her a tangerine once. She recalls intimately peeling off the segments like she was undressing for him — shell, flesh, rind. She wanted to taste him, feel his essence travel down towards her empty stomach like water. She wanted him to hydrate her. She had been so thirsty these past years, her lips growing more parched in the summer when their eyes would whisper their theatre of expressions to each other. She missed the choreography of speech, the way words sounded when flicked nonchalantly off the tongue. Did the lips touch, a brief companionship, or did they remain separate, two boats moored against a pale tide? One could not say the word grief without a touching of the lips, a slow exhalation, near the end. This memory carried her ashore in the arms of Aphrodite before she was plunged once again into the tides. He had left words beneath her skin so that she would try to wash away her complexion to expose them; she would tunnel her nails into her marrow to harpoon them out. She yearned for a new skin, wept rain for one where youth could look back on age. He would tell her that when bathing, one’s skin is washed off and slides, silent, from one’s body. It is translated into words, sounds, images. The hollow of a cheek. The broken seashells of one’s fingernails. Water moulds into body when one bathes, replacing the painting of skin with something infinitely more fragile, a tabula rasa, but something which could not satisfy her thirst. She missed the breach of sweat on skin, dew, tears — the authenticity of such natural occurrences. Grief grew among her like an artificial plant which did not require water — how long must she bear this dryness? She could almost fool herself when she emerged from the shower, her skin flushed like a blushing bride’s. He used to whisper to her damp hair that he loved her most in this moment: loved her for the vulnerability she portrayed in the way she would look at herself in their mirror in her nightgown, the endearing facial expressions she would exchange with it as she searched for meaning in her reflection. She spread out her body on their bed like a map, yet she no longer knew where she was. A lost tourist here. She wished his fingers would trace a path that she could follow. She remembered the androgynous art of their communication throughout the house; every silent thought articulated and drawn out like a bow against a violin. Soprano, crescendo, diminuendo. Every action had a subtext the other came to understand and decipher. Yet she could not understand this house now — it offered her no sincerity, no comfort. She pulled against the stitches of the sheets, felt the rude barrier of cotton chafe against her skin as she tucked herself into corners and creases she knew were there, shapes her body could not help but find and replicate in the dark. She could wrap herself in this pretence, let herself fade away harmlessly into the mattress. Some nights she was wind. During the day, before the sun dissipated into the horizon like a copper penny, she needed a noise to dissolve into. The busy kitchen with its humming, tapping and whirring proved a fitting orchestra. She could tune in, switch off, drown out the deluge of grey sounds inhabiting different spaces in time behind her eyelids. She had to reacquaint herself with the house after he’d gone, like the objects within no longer held meaning — only the meaning he had attached to them. She stayed in places where she felt him more strongly; on the two-seater sofa in the living room, the countertop in the kitchen, the middle section of their bed. She remembers the back of his neck, his palms, the places she marked mine. The birthmark above her left knee he would kiss before sleep, leaving his trace of petrichor upon her breath. Her nails dug into the sheets on the empty half of the bed as her words fell like teeth from her mouth. As the kisses that had blossomed on her shoulders and neck and thighs became open wounds, distance eluded her and her skin moulded into the gap between the wall and armchair with as much ease as she once fitted into the space beneath his collarbone. Her body had packed itself up. The house held her in its arms like a sick child. She would whisper to the#moonas the night unveiled its dark ribbons, a dusty pearl, as the water rushed up to the stars and the end became but the beginning, hoping for a whisper back…