Skin

by Claire Thompson

SKIN

Your world changes in winter. The snow rolls in from the mountains and the city pretends to sleep. This is the real city, you tell me, away from the monuments and history that draw the tourists like moths in the summer. For me, that winter was when I stopped belonging, if I ever belonged here at all.

Outside tonight it’s well below zero. Snow is packed in the gutters in dirty, icy heaps, and you and I are making our way through the back streets to your favourite bar. My nose is so cold I can’t feel it at all. This will be the night our relationship ends, in a similar state of numbness, and the pain will sit simmering beneath my skin for months. We hold hands as we walk, but when I drop one of my gloves you don’t even pause. I stoop to pick it up and you keep walking and our hands are jerked apart. You stop, your whole body is tense and impatient, and my fingers, scrabbling on the ground for the glove, stick for a minute to the cold, dirty ice. I mean to say aspetta--wait--but the words get tangled in my brain and instead I say assapora--taste, savour--as though even now some part of me is begging you to notice this moment, to hang onto it. We start walking again and you take my hand, but even inside your gloved palm it won’t warm up.

I know your face so well now, the way your eyes crinkle into well-worn paths, like riverbeds, grooves carved by water flowing over stones. Your eyes shift colour from green to brown, refracting the light.

In your world the word for language, lingua, is the same as the word for tongue. Such an intimate word. Your tongue when you kissed me drew me into your private space. Your language when you spoke it pushed me away. I tried to learn your tongue, loved to kiss your language. Meeting you for the first time at a bar one night, you stood next to me and said, “I would like to ‘ave you for dinner,” and I laughed and laughed and you didn’t understand, but you laughed too. You couldn’t pronounce my name and so instead you called me bella, beautiful. You ran your fingers over my face like you’d been touching me for years.

You took me home that first night. I wanted to tell you stories with my eyes to make up for a mouth that had nothing to say. The next morning you taught me a few words. Coffee. Boyfriend. Sunlight. History. I thought only briefly of home in the next few months, the crash of the surf, the dull green bushland, the heavy dust of the drought. I decided that look in your eyes was love.

“What will you drink?” you say as we walk into the bar, with that accent that even now makes my stomach flutter. I am standing in that intimate space between you and your breath, and suddenly I feel like an impostor.

“Vino bianco,” I say tentatively, white wine. We alternate; sometimes you speak my tongue and I yours, a stiff formality of textbooks lurking underneath, as we hover on this periphery of language and understanding.

You taught me the words for honey, warmth. I taught you how to say forever. You told me stories about your friends and I didn’t understand. I told you stories about my family and you didn’t understand. I lay in your bed in the mornings with the noise from the streets below rising like steam. You would roll onto the bed next to me and grab me in a crumple of sheets, and laughing we would lie there with the sun streaming in, saying nothing. In the beginning I thought the silence was a measure of how well we spoke to each other.

We sit at a table in the corner, and out of habit you take my fingers in your hand.
“Is cold tonight, eh?” you say, and I’m turning the scene from outside over and over in my head. “Are we alright?” I say, and suddenly feel hot and cold all over.
“Che?” Your face, just inches away from mine, leaning in over the dull roar of the music. “I don’t hear what you say.”

I got a package from home full of socks and photos with a letter full of hope for the coming summer. While here we slid towards winter. You found me sitting on your bed, wrapped in a blanket, crying.
“What is it?” you asked.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just a bit homesick.”
“You are sad,” you said.
“I’m not sad. Non sono triste,” not even sure if I was making sense.
“But you cry.” You sat on the side of the bed, your brow crinkled. How to describe shades of sad to you?
“Yes, but I’m not sad. Not always.”
“I don’t understand,” you said.
“I’m not sad,” I told you again.
“But you cry.”
We live in these crazy circles, on the skin of things.

Now, at the bar, surrounded by the chinking of glasses, voices, music, I can feel weeks, months of words rushing up to my tongue.
“I just feel like something has shifted these past couple of months,” I say. “Like there’s suddenly a space between us. Not a physical…just that…I mean, I love you, that’s not the point.” I know I’m being unfair, but more than anything I want you to make sense of this jumble of words that you never learned in the first place.
“Please, I’m not understanding,” you’re shaking your head. “You tell me again.” You lean in, frowning, trying your hardest. I try to think in your language but the words are like water, slipping through my fingers.
“I’m not happy,” I say finally, and inside me something breaks. You look at me with sad eyes. You know these words. Happy. Angry. Sad. Basic emotions. What you don’t understand, or what I can’t explain to you, are the layers underneath. We sit for a moment, trapped in silence.
“I love you, though,” I venture, after a moment.
“But I not make you happy.”
“I love you,” I say again.
“You are not happy. Love is happy.”
“They’re two different things,” I say.
You say nothing. I don’t know if it’s because you don’t understand, or because you do.
I can see my reflection in your eyes.