1.
Ilya Kaminsky’s poem While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses speaks of the vulnerability of the body in relation to another. He ends the poem with the line: “You can fuck anyone, but who can you sit in water with?”
You ask yourself: who can you sit in water with? Where they are and how soon can you meet them?
You are now transported to the bed. You think about what the bed symbolises, how bodies share them, how in relationships you are expected to share them. You wake up together ugly, you go to sleep together tired.
You think about how your bodies are linked. But how does the body, your body, begin to find comfort in another?
You are lying in bed. You are afraid of your body naked under white sheets. You wrestle under them like a soldier searching for cover.
You know there’s no hiding your body, its blemishes and marks.
You are woken from your slumber. You are in bed with all your loneliness.
2.
You recall a line in Padraig O’Tuama’s L is for Lonely: “All love is a little lonely made of ordinary stuff.”
Your body is ordinary; you wonder if you are love. If you can possess it amongst all the loneliness.
You lay still; not moving because moving is undressing this body with all its history.
The book is not easily closed once opened. Your exposed flesh is fragile pages, prone to breakage.
3.
Ocean Vuong writes in his poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds: “Everyone can forget us—as long as you remember.”
Your body is under the weight of memory. It follows you.
You want to dwell in this feeling, to be static as hands wash through each other, but is your skin too rough? Will its jagged edges cut what ties you together?
4.
Your language struggles to express your body. How can you define something without the materials of words?
All you are left with is silence.
Now you learn saudade.
5.
Saudade. It is a single word in Portuguese.
But you can only describe it in four: the absence of you.
You say saudade once more as your arms drop with the relief of a deep breath.
To have all this longing, and nowhere to put it.
About the author
Ahmed Yussuf is a Melbourne based freelance journalist and founder of race and politics podcast, Race Card.