LUCY ŞiiENIZ

Her blurred eyes and cold lips moving but making no sound, just mouthing the words “remember, 

remember”

 

I'm trying to remember. The warm of skin and our soft feet padding on the floor boards. Steam from the kettle and that chocolate coffee from Vietnam you like. Strong and rich.

 

To check you are healthy, you test your blood daily. You squeeze a drop from your hand into your water glass and offer it to me like poison.

 

I cut fresh vegetables. You line up the avocados against lettuce against tomatoes and olive oil and lemon and salt makes it sweet with the yolk spilling over like a volcano. All of the colours bled together. The morning is ripe and tender. 

 

The washing machine hums and it’s so quiet that we can hear the wind and the trees are talking more loudly than we are. Their incoherent whispers feels like gossip but nature isn’t judgemental of us because we are alone here just passing the jam back and forth and dipping olives in random assortments and laughing about the strange taste of things.

 

We feel out our limbs this morning. We move to remember that we are malleable with practise. I peel myself open through my hamstrings, quads, open splits. We practise what it means to hold ourselves in even distribution of weight and reach for each other in awkward contortions on the floor. We listen to ourselves breathing deeply and this new house has the same faint smell of hot wood. You say the heat reminds you of where you came from but the air is tight with its lack of moisture. I misjudged our proximity and our legs slide over each other and we’re blushing, pulling away just in time to sync into our next downward stretch.

 

I put the kettle back on. You hold your face over the steam as it leaks from the tip, hold it in your mouth and blow the smoke to me. We find ourselves wrapped in limbs over the sofa. The fits of laughter. In conversation, we take thousands of shapes and cohesivity is illusioned. Language loses its permanency. I become as many colours as the sky. It takes time to notice but it melts together seamlessly.

 

The tea never gets made. We stay on the sofa and dive between the skin. I love your collarbones and the bare space of your neck. The nook between your rib cage.

 

One afternoon, you're napping at the bed's edge and suddenly screaming, crashing to the floor with purpose like a goalie in the final minutes of a game. You awaken and look up at me, for a moment you are somewhere in between anguish and flying.

 

The blue sky reflects of the white of the snow and the whole world is glistening.