Love is the only thing you are born holding from the womb. Never hungry, never cold, entirely known. As you live, love becomes the catalyst for all experience.

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Do I mistake my softness for something taut?

My gentle mistake. Your face as my mirror, and forget it was yours first?

There is a skin that never toughens, no matter how many summers you dry it with. Mine is like one of those where my stems grow sore from lying on them wrong, and I have wondered if this is what you must have felt too, when I played out my habit of sleeping only on my cheekbones. The cold easily goes to my feet; they knot together. A skin so fraught and stretched for miles, yet they remember how to breathe. I’d have let my knees drop, would have knelt with you in that blood-red fur—wrist deep and unflinching, a surrendering warmth—the two of us finding out just how much a small body can give up.

This bruise on the left side of my knee is one I cannot stop pressing—like a white-hot forever. It contains a singular photograph in it, and she, there, is a woman with her weight on one hip and there is nothing delicate about her face. Maybe I gaze too long, too long and too rude about it, as though my nose in the gloss, a tear tells me where she becomes me.

Can you find scar tissue there in between the folds? It is nowhere solid that joint was made and held.

I’d find instead that I’d like her, actually, to meet at a party; I wouldn’t know she had me under a full moon. That I’d have gone over, introduced myself poorly, and asked what she was drinking. We’d both now stand stilly and unstitched with a thin flute in our left hand and letting the bubbles hit the tops of our shiny noses—pretending not to recognise the shape of our own laughter in someone else's mouth.

Her hands are an inventory I know well before I’d known to start cataloguing it: the cat scratch scar shaped like a comma at her thumb base, pale and scored indentations left in her skin long left faint when one of the many diamond rings had lost use. The precise economy with which she peels a ripe mandarin down in one spiralling ribbon, daring and begging the fruit to collapse and fleck in her fingers before she's finished with it. I have the same comma, maybe bracket—whatever you want to call it—but mine came from a different cat, a different decade, with a different ounce of antagonisation all lurking in the hours it shaped itself in. I used to file this under the heading of coincidence. I've since stopped being able to afford that filing system.

I think of McCrae foreshore, the ripples arriving between my toes when I am salted just the right amount—and how even there, something like the truest of shapes keep on shining through. We have not asked the salt to seep in, neither on her skin nor mine. It floods in wherever it is willing, in no hurry to be noticed at all. I have looked for her in the shallows there too, though there would never be a way of knowing she has never once stood on that particular sandbank, a land unmused to the pulse. This is the trick of it; you may plant someone in a place, and it will hold them regardless and obedient to memory. Such water would hold its shape for exactly as long as you're pouring it and not one second more. I keep pouring, and it starts to overflow.

Dog days do this to me; the sweat starts mouthing a language of its own, and where the brine tastes real sweet to you now. You take a leap in the weather of warm winds like that. Which version of me has landed on the other side? That swollen one, sugar-slick and unsultry. Or that
one with cotton seams always threatening to burst, sauvignon-spitting and selfish. I look at you now, sunbleached from shoulder to ankle and speckled like a thousand small grey bruises. Even in the air against you, you are steady on your legs in a way I have never come to be on mine.

There is sound that comes with it—wide and somatic, jewel-drenched—the wild bliss that tightens a muscle straight down to the cell and a toxic flush when you spot it. I keep a chalice for it anyway, and I burn my right-side pinky toe on incense, calling this childishly idle when it is my appetite for more. I am finding my delight pathetic and indulgent; my need to wear clothes of foreverness—wings and all.

The right decision would have been to savour the loss of control, to delight in it. Allow the world to shift and see where it left us. But the aftereffect of those fantasies curls back into ordinary moments and is stranger for being smaller. Like driving through an intersection and feeling like I've forgotten how to steer while I am white-knuckled on the wheel. Or while standing above the sink, thinking of the crack-sound of glass shattering in my hands—an expulsion of desire and shame arriving all at once—indistinguishable.

Hinges weren’t yet tied to you. You were circular; you were love forever. I think about her and her roots put down into nowhere and cyclical, not down because there was nothing there yet to straighten you out. My mother's name is written on the back of my diary in all its different forms in my unpractised handwriting. Her signature was one I drew most, rehearsing the right I held to exist by first reciting hers.

There is an unhurried, almost surgical way she folds a fitted sheet—with denim knees bent and working the elastic corners as if she’s found something and is stuffing it back where it can't get out again. It has no expectation that you bear its burden; it begs for the hoarding. Be patient, and maybe even be a little sly about it. Until I look up one day and realise I've assembled her whole out of nothing but leftovers. I reach, often at nighttime, to grab my own wrist the way I imagine she might have once done for herself, thumb pressed into the soft crease where our heartbeat sits and beats closest to the surface, and I cannot tell if I am comforting myself or trying to cautiously embody her fully; if there is a distinction left between the two gestures at all now.
I am looking for the watermark on this paper, tilting its soft fibres towards the light to see if anything was pressed into it before it was touched. Sometimes I find you. Sometimes I am just tilting it. I'm the surface something was poured onto before I had any say in what would come through. I was not the one who wanted the translucent pattern of light, glowing faintly wherever she was pressed thinnest, going opaque and stubborn everywhere she never reached at all. There are days I resent the softness exactly for this reason and that it took such an impression so easily and that it never toughened the way I wanted it to; into something scarred over and finished and no longer asking me any questions. But there are other days—wet-sand days—where I think the softness is the only inheritance I get to keep holding, intertwined.

This has got to last far longer than I have been told; better just to allow it to come to me, gingerly, with encouragement. Like a skittish dog, a threat or habit it may find out. You let your hand rest open on your baby-shaped knee, and you look somewhere else entirely, at perhaps a middle distance, and you wait for it to decide you are adequate to approach. It takes longer than you would like, but a life that comes to you because it is coaxed in is different altogether from what is dragged in on a leash, and it is no longer a question to decide which one I want in the house.

This is what I do with you—my palms open on my own knees—patient like a hunter that has decided this is the only bait that works a treat. Until you wander over, and it means more for having been your idea.

Maybe I think you do not have to get on her good side. Maybe it's her loss for not allowing you goodness, and you have better things to do than beg. I keep having this vision of her at the bar with her hair down. Where is this coming from? I like you a little mean. I like the deadpan, the heavy eyelids, and the bunny teeth. Seemingly unaware of your beauty and your directness so palpable.

Will I always find myself looking for you?

In every mouth that won’t apologise for its teeth.

There is a softness in a rabbit that reads, a fur that yields itself before it resists, the architecture of a vermin body that is born to run and not to fight. I used to think that’s what we were—nothing to stay for, everything to die for. Yet a rabbit is also strong on its hind legs, imperceptible until it starts to kick. It can break its own spine thrashing against what and who is holding it and would rather die correcting the position of its body than live a crooked life in someone else’s calloused grip.

I remember which year the kangaroo paws came early and left the driveway stained and sticky undertoe, the exact words used and the exact words spoken to be swallowed like gum. In my sternum, I tell myself that this ledger is for her so that if she is ever asked to remember who she was before—when the remembering one day might become eel-quick in her hands—someone will have written it down, flat pressed in book pages like brittle flowers. But I know, sap-slow and certain, that the ledger has always been for me. I am made out of half-remembered weather because I cannot yet do it in any other way. Here, you assemble one on index cards for the rest of your natural life, and you call it making love because it is. Because there is no better word for the habit of turning what frightens you into something you can carry in one hand, still warm, to fly and file away.

Let this sit next to the tender. Let a rabbit's hind legs lay gently next to its soft tummy. The folded sheet sits next to the fitted one I have never known to fold, and the salt water beside the bowl that desires to hold it. She is both. So, unavoidably, am I. Passed down through pulse points; through whatever temperature your body desires that this is the boiling point, and at which you have been salted enough.

Everything after is only this: trying to get back to that first, unearned fullness—an oceanic exhaustion—and finding that the getting back is the whole of a life.

Author Bio

Mia Anderson is an art writing student under Sarah Gorey at RMIT.

Image Credits

Melissa Nguyen, A letter to my mother; a letter to your mother 2026, installation view. Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.