Materia

Photographs by
Nicole Maria Winkler

Words by
Elaine M.L. Tam

I am first a disappearing trick, but your second thought left to percolate; still, unlikely, given nine months of contiguity, one bleeding edge.

You, a receptacle, a bag, for life. About this period there are photographs of your nervous splendour. Your body young, faintly overexposed. Bulges strain but create soft outlines; the adumbration of something profound, or perhaps just eager and heavy. Its contact with a sheath, at times troubled — a motile fusing, refusing, careening forth, double take. Itʼs not commitment, itʼs enmeshment, but ʻthereʼs a reason why they call it labourʼ. Your touch reposeful, humour bone dry; who else smiles recalling being split in two? (If I were less like you, Iʼd find it a little psychotic.)

Who carves their way through the city because I inferred I was ʻaround for lunchʼ? (Iʼm seven again, in my buoyant gait, insoles of school shoes dressed in my penned name: the place I first learned your handwriting. Iʼm ten, fishing for compliments; my boyish insouciance demands attention, adorable, loathsome. Sweet sixteen, and sweetly ignoring you.) With age the tune is changing. How must it feel to fight a flame that yearns to self-extinguish — save the petals plucked from a proud flower — yet care ceaselessly for minutiae — outer extremities — circulation to purpling digits, or moisturiser for rough elbows. Care about ʻthe birthdays I couldnʼt make it toʼ, all choked up.

Questions like concertinas — sprung folds. I cradle that younger you, an image taken into my arms and committed to memory. A fallout, with love. That you, that I am, mistakes simple connections for a path; synapses in flight from a lonely aneurism; the sky deepening.

But sometimes I hit pause at this same familiar stopover: return to that version, silver with tears. Silver with salmon scales — shimmering, stammering — you flood while I fleck. You wonʼt remember this, but you once said to me ʻnothing feels as good as seeing your name in printʼ (your own mom illiterate, who did nothing but pray). This is why I write, why I lay new drafts down, ever patient. Work edit by edit, knead a gentle morph. In some warm interior space a secret is flowering which, short though life is, shall never quite cool.

All clothing by
ROKH