She who is
They meet when she is half-formed (a ghost, a paper-thin silhouette). In the ‘‘what are you looking for?’’ box, her profile says substance. Meaning: something more than she’s had. Meaning: something more than she’s got. Meaning: something to stitch that widening seam down the middle of her ribcage, to pull tight, like a corset, hold her all together.
His says: looking for ‘the one’.
They’ve been talking for a while, building an image of one another through pixels. You seem kind, he’d write, such a gentle soul. Those words were clay plastered atop her bones, filling in the places she was see-through.
They meet at an art gallery when the sun is high and the light golden. She listens as he shows her around – he’s an art student, you see, learning pottery and watercolour and capturing essence. But he is not what she imagined him to be (from the cardigan selfies and cups of tea). This man is coiled midnight, and he holds her eyes with intent, as one might hold the stars in the sky to stop them from falling.
At one point, he asks if he can take her hand. She lets him, lets their fingers slide together, his warm, and hers, like wax, melting into his skin. He’s old fashioned, he says, likes to take things slow.
They move into a room full of other half-formed things. Marble busts with no noses, no arms, semblance of being. She thinks they are, perhaps, the essence he speaks of, but he ignores them in favour of the centrepiece. She is milk-white. She is lifelike. She is tall and elegant, sweeping a veil around herself mid-step. The ripples in stone cascade together so that her hair becomes her dress and her dress the waves of stone on which she stands.
‘‘She reminds me of you,’’ he whispers into her ear, tucking a strand of hair behind it. She feels the transparency wash from her skin, feels the urge to curve her body to his, to stand as the statue is, poised and of the gods.
Since then, he has given her many words. When she tries new foods that burn her tongue, he says that she is brave. When she sketches alongside him, he says that she’s a natural. When she makes a terrible joke, he laughs, like she’s the funniest person he’s ever met. And at night, she takes the words home in patches and stitches them on to her outline, a quilt-like skin, until all the gaps are covered up.
(She thought she knew who she was, you see, thought herself ready, but pieces were taken away bit by bit until she stood, uneven, on the edge of a cliff with crumbling feet to balance on and half a ribcage – )
One evening, they go to his studio. She watches him, bent at his pottery wheel like a wilting fern, gathering clay in his fingers. He lets her sit at it, guides her fingers from behind. You are not like