In his eyes, there is the glip of a fish unsettling from its resting place. It looks up through the water at the city looking back. We are all aware of the encroaching ice.
I remember swimming. As a child, before the body grew complicated. In the indoor pool, in a new country, the water lifting and protecting me. A voice too loud and close above, and my head sinking into the water, deaf to that harsh upper language, enclosed and listening to my own breath and blood and volume as I became weightless. Before the body demanded air, it demanded joy and buoyancy. It knew what it could bear.
He remembers the pool in the park, the wave on my chest. A weight lifts. My voice rises.
I remember flying alone. Waking just before dawn to watch the bright dot at the edge of the wing. I mistook that light for the earth, at first. A distant city. Moving in that half-tone, above clouds or racing beside them, and the blue that came over the sky like a friend, a guide, to show me I had broken through.
We remember.
And feeling buried again as we sank through the rainclouds to Sydney, the pewter harbour gleaming. I imagined falling into the water, the emergency life jackets bursting open at the neck. I worried I had forgotten the instructions. But we did not fall. The huge steward brought me half a cup of apple juice, touched a finger to his lips. I was unaccompanied, unafraid. The body knew that it was exiled, condemned. The body dreaded landing. Because up there we were yet to arrive. We were anything at all. That juice was sweet.
I remember wanting to be air. As the body grew complicated and I grew careful. I wanted to be invisible and everywhere, I wanted to be safe. I kept the colour blue, felt it hovering above any weather. A place between, where I could breathe. A city waited below where I might become, and keep becoming, someone new.
He doesn’t know what this is like. Never had to think about it, until now.
I remember the compression of my grandparents’ house, the shame at taking up space, developing asthma, anxiety, slowly learning to move unseen. Damp carpet, strange food that soon became ordinary. Parent–teacher nights without parents, notes I lost. Studying by torchlight, believing the body was a way out, but wanting something more fundamental than microbiology. To enter my skin in order to leave it. With no clear image of the future, only that high air between.
I learned that a body can’t breathe up there. The air’s too thin.
He remembers looking through his mother’s things. The ghost in his chest. Phantom pains. Carrying the body like it was made of glass. He watched me, but he didn’t want me; he wanted to occupy my space. Take all the air. Make it impossible to breathe. And what entitled him? What made him believe that this was good?
I refused to become that image.
I remember landing in myself. Choosing myself. By then I was settled. I possessed myself. I knew how to speak. There were still times I thought that I wanted to leave my body. Release myself into the airways. There were times when I thought I was safe.
He remembers his goodness, inconsolable. Walking in his sleep. He remembers avoiding that street.
I remember buying lilies. The indulgence of it, buying flowers for no reason, knowing that they were already close to dying. What had moved me? Pity, perhaps, or an affinity. The lilies were half-price. It was the end of the day and the flowers stood in a blue plastic bucket out the front of a convenience store, waiting to be thrown away. The woman behind the counter had a child with her, she might have taken them home herself if I hadn’t bought them. It wasn’t a rescue. It was the scent of them on the warm air, the scent that refused to dissipate. Seven dollars and fifty cents. I thought at the time that it was not much, a meal, that I would skip a meal for this. I could think like this only when I was not hungry. Now the body is free, and I am always hungry.
He remembers buying the flowers himself.
I recall quite clearly my own generosity in bringing them into the house. Into the kitchen, where I cut the stems and filled a jar from the tap, not arranging them but letting them fall, which they did perfectly, eloquent in their living-dying bodies, the miracle of severed limbs that still drank water as though they lived. The way they dropped their pollen, envelope-brown.
Only later did I see that I was mourning.
He remembers wanting the flowers more than anything, that memory creeping into him at the top of the subway steps, outside the mall, when he wasn’t looking. Did he know then that I was with him? I was learning. I knew just how to let his body lean down and take the lilies, fresh, and separate the notes in his pocket, and smile at the woman and her little daughter, who looked and looked at us and saw me there and turned and hid her face behind her mother’s shoulder, laughing.
I want to be remembered.
He is helpless, lying here. He remembers all his dreams of falling.
He is still falling.
I loved my body. There were days that the city would open for me, frangipanis strewn across the asphalt, the scent of wild fruit rotting in people’s tiny front gardens, that sky. The tangled backstreets, a luxury of wrong directions. Days when even the stench of garbage left in alleys was intoxicating. Damp forest air without a forest. Cool sea perfumed by diesel. The air was astonishing. The air.
I remember his eyes on me. That suffocation.
I remember walking home in the dark, through the orange smog, my eyes his eyes stinging from the fighting and the air, from inside and out, the membranes all dissolving.
I remember that night, the way he crossed the room as I was sleeping, touched the light, reached for my skin. It was as though I was not there at all, a ghost, translucent. It wasn’t possible to leave my body. It wasn’t safe to stay. So I refused to sleep.
I refused.
And he went out into the hall and did not look back.
I refuse.
I look back now, from this unforgiving glass, and I make him remember me.
These lilies have outlived us, Adam. Do you see this? We are new.
I remember myself.