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.

This bruise on the left side of my knee—white hot forever—is one I cannot stop pressing. This photograph appears in it, and she is a woman with her weight on one hip and nothing careful about her face. I am perhaps looking too long, too long and too rude, probing for the tear where she becomes me. There’s no scar tissue in between the gloss, no rightful place where that join was made and opened. I’d find instead that I’d actually like her to meet at a party, if I didn’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 hands—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.

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 keeps shining through. The salt has never asked any permission, neither on her skin or mine. It goes in wherever it is open, in no hurry to be noticed at all. I have looked for her in the shallows there too, though there would no way of knowing she has never once stood on that particular sand bank—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, 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.

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 existence by first reciting hers.

There is an unhurried, almost surgical way she folds a fitted sheet,—with denim knees and working the elastic corners as she’s found something and stuffing it back where it can't get out again. None of it asks to be kept, just accumulating, patient, and maybe even a little sly about it, until I look up one day and realise I've assembled her whole out of nothing but leftovers. Some nights I hold my own wrist the way I imagine she once held hers—thumb pressed into the soft crease where our heartbeat sits closest to the surface—and I cannot tell if I am comforting myself or trying to cautiously embody her fully, if there is a difference left between the two gestures at all.

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 that, 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.

Her hands are an inventory I know well before I’d known to start cataloguing it. The cat scratch scar shaped like a comma along the base of her thumb, the pale groove a ring left behind long after one of the many diamond rings stopped being worn, the particular economy with which she peels a ripe mandarin in one spiralling ribbon, daring and begging the fruit to fall apart in her fingers before she's finished with it. I have the same comma or bracket—whatever you want to see it as— though mine came from a different cat, a different decade, and an antagonisation with nothing in common with hers, except the length of shape it decided to leave. I used to file this under the term of coincidence, and I've since stopped being able to afford that filing system.

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 un-sultry? Or that one with cotton seams always threatening to burst, sauvignon-spitting and selfish? I look at you now, sun-bleached 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 been 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 and call this childishly idle when it is my appetite for more. Finding my delight pathetic and indulgent,;he need to wear clothes of foreverness, wings and all.

The right decision would have been to savour the loss of control, to let the world 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.