I look back at the language I used as a child and wonder how I was ever so creative. My world is now one of precise angular adjectives and direct connective denominators. I had managed to avoid all that in my first juvenile attempts at communication. The language of my childhood was a watercolour wash of nouns and verbs, it flowed like the sea they found you in… I had cast the world so broadly and dynamically that I hid all its flaws. I feel like I’ve lost that part of myself. I can’t communicate with my past. I can’t read my own writing.
I’d been writing since I was a child, but had only made a serious effort at codifying my language when I began secondary school and took classes on the art of neography with everybody else. It was a time shot through with currents of emotional intensity, as if we all knew the things we wove together, those webs of words, were only ever going to be a first draft. We each had to pick a motif for our language, a key. I only gave myself one option: the sea, the same sea they found your body in of weeks before. That sea beyond the hill, that view from our back garden, framed with marigolds and magnolias.
You were obsessed with the colour orange. All things bright and burning. I had naturally considered myself your opposite. I then watched as my elemental presence whisked you away. Our parents told me it was beautiful, as if you were with me in your final moments.
So, a flowing language of water and all things blue. A fluid script in sapphire ink.
Back then, I was too naïve to be angry, or to see the part I’d played in what transpired. I fully submerged myself in my imagination, my mission of transformation. It really is a miracle how we get caught up in other people’s stories.
We’d gone on a treasure hunt in the twilight of the previous year, a trip carved out in fragments of my pre-language. They took so long to cohere again I worry if they retain anything at all from those days:
With sky-bright eyes she invited me out on a streaming day to be a part of the torrent and search.
“Something’s hidden,” she said from a different beach. “I need you to help me find it.”
She’d tugged the kayak through the clouds like plumes of paint across the harbour’s hills. I wanted to help. She was finishing off her language, days before her final test. The pressure of all that ejected her out of the world to be here, with me.
“There isn’t much light left.” On the swaying waves she paddled as the rain pooled on her face and tangled in the estuaries of her hair. Lights low on the hills flashed like distant signals, as if the land were hidden and we had to be warned, somehow, about what we could already see.
Looking back at my ash-encrusted journals, I still can’t decipher half of what I’d said to you. I was able to hold it in me, back then, as I composed those words and all their associations, but my langauge has evolved since then. It’s now solid enough to use. Before, I’d rendered everything as part of a fluid universal substance, transforming the world into a place where mind and matter whorled together. The script of my younger self read, in its raw form, like a cross between a spray of gutter-water and a smudged equation in fluid dynamics.
My feet left puddled imprints in the island’s sand as I trudged behind her, soaked. Inland, past the spindly grasses now streaming with channels of runoff, and the flowers all bowing their heads and looking away from me to speak, instead, in scent. Each one bloomed like an inkblot in my mind as I stumbled, trying not to spill my thoughts over my feet.
She led me through the mist-knotted trees to a clearing, a diorama, a picnic table, mud.
“Are you ok?”
I nodded, feeling like the child I was.
“We can camp here. No one will be around on a night like tonight.”
Later, after the drizzle had drifted off, she found her flickering torch and said: “Follow me.”
The depths made it hard to breathe. I floated, arms out, along her liquid-bright path and towards a broken patch of bramble anchored by fallen branches.
Lumps of wood came away in her hands and released the warmth of things invisible, growing.
“Crouch next to me. You see that? Can you pluck it out for me?”
I did so, my hands smaller and paler than hers, grasping something that felt like it belonged in an orchid: an apple. Specks drifted around us.
“You can eat it,” she said. “It’s what we came to find.”
I didn’t have any food of my own, so I did as she said and held her hand as she led me back to the tent, that chamber that beat around us like a heart.
She brought out her notebook. “It’s important that you talk to me as you fall asleep. Anything that comes to mind. Remember all those times I read to you when you were younger? Just like that, but in your own words now.”
“Can you start me off?”
She smiled. “Make it about someone who couldn’t find their words.”
“A fish!”
“Perfect. Are you feeling tired yet?”
“It’s still early. I have to tell you about the fish.”
“What you ate will let you do that as you drift away.”
So, I found a home for my fish and told her my dream as I dreamt it, waking again and again as she caught my words between the pages of her book.
I could tell you the rest. It’s simple. Nothing much happened. We paddled home, told our parents we had a great time. You studied, sat your test, and passed away. I still don’t know why. I just hope you didn’t feel guilty. I would have forgiven you. I had words to spare. You knew that. I always had words to spare.
Why am I writing this?
Sifting through our parents’ papers after the fire, I realised I had to reconstruct the past. Half their weatherboard bungalow in Lyttelton had gone up. I was suspicious. Fire was your element.
Everybody had journals — how else could we each invent a language of our own — but I thought yours were buried with you. Instead, they were just another victim of our parent’s neglect. As I stood alone in the embers I’d found both our books, their pages ruffling in the southern air. I’d had to relearn my language, before I could decipher yours.
My partner at the time, Joseph, suggested we go back to the island to try and see what we could. He was almost fluent in my language, and I in his — an earthy mix of vowels — so he wanted to help translate.
“She didn’t know you, though.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I can just offer moral support. The sense of space will help you work.”
So, after I had reconnected with my waterlogged younger self, we paddled out.
“You never moved away from here?” he asked.
“Why would I have wanted to?”
He knocked the oar against the side of the kayak. “To get away from your past.”
“Not after I’d spent so much time threading the landscape with my words. It’s linked to my language. I worry, if I leave, that I won’t be able to speak. Not even in English.”
I regretted the trip as soon as I stepped ashore, and just wanted to wander the beach alone, to run the sand and all its tiny shells against my skin.
The same sand that caught in his beard.
“I think it was this way.”
“She was what, twenty-two? You felt safe out here with her?”
“Of course. It was windier that day than it is now, and raining. We had a summer when it seemed to rain every day.”
He laughed. “Locals.”
We went up the beach and into the flowers and fields.
“What did your parents do with your juvenilia? Did you keep it?”
“We weren’t really into the whole thing. We were as much as anyone is, I guess. Just never to the extent it became our lives.” Maybe that was why his language seemed so basic.
“What a waste.”
You can image us, together. Me looking him in the eye and taking him by the hand to touch and whisper. Sitting with him for months and teaching him and feeling our connection and making new words in that space. The IPA chart pasted up on my wall. Repeat after me. Feel this energy, this experience, mixed with that colour. The raindrops on the windowpane on the morning of my sixteenth birthday. This is the meaning of that word. Okay, next is… Roll your tongue like that. There. The hush between each fricative, the labiodental breaths.
Why would I waste all that time?
At the campsite I took your place and led him by torchlight down the well-remembered path. Crouching in the vegetal embrace, I reached into the darkness and found that strange thing — an apple, with what looked like ears and a nose: Joseph’s face. He didn’t seem to notice.
“What are you going to do with that?” he asked.
“Nothing. I just wanted to see if they were here. I’ll begin translating her work in the morning if you want to explore by yourself. I already have what I need.”
“I can take a hint,” he said behind me as we walked back to the tent.
Later that night he placed his hand between my legs and as I rolled towards him he pressed his face to mine and forced a piece of apple down my throat with his tongue.
“I only wanted to get to know you better. Your world, those depths…” His words washed away in my rising tide of sleep. And I heard you:
My mind scorches as I sit here in the heat like a prehistoric rock. I can’t be creative with them around. All these thoughts and opinions about me. They say you need to make a new language to truly experience and express yourself, but words are not a raw format, each one is loaded, presupposed. I can only say so much through this sea of consonants and vowels before its surface closes over me. How can I express the inadequacies of my own creation?
I can’t even begin to do that without an idea of who I am or what I want to be. I don’t want to be anything. That sounds dramatic. A cliché. Let me explain: To have a language is not just a way of speaking. An intimacy. No, they learn to speak ‘me’, and they think they know me, that I have a fire, that I’m hard edged. All that from my fucking metaphors. Anything, any symbol I pick, any idiolect of the soul will go out and react and become something other. I can’t have my pure uncoloured version of myself. Instead, I just set everything alight.
I sit in my room and try to write and create in the mandated way. I take my pen and run its steel nib along the paper. I give up. I take my lighter and burn the paper. I’m too embedded in what I think they think of me. My sister — I love her and her capacity for language — but she already uses my neologisms, letting them hang in the air like embers. These sparks cling to me and heat me and cast me in a mould, away from my raw molten state. She is acquainting herself with an image. All these words around me, yet I cannot speak.
My language is still half-formed after all this time, scrawled on balls of charred paper around the room.
I walk the Sumner sands and learn that my position is not a common one. People talk in tongues around me. Like my sister, she sees beauty in all that colour. I only see it as obscurity. All I am is heat.
But I cannot fail the exam.
I am sorry, Juliette, if you ever read this. I had to find a way. You knew what to do, I saw it in a dream. Those words, they were never mine anyway.
I woke then, his hand hot over my mouth. Was what I told him the truth, or did he prompt some foreign design with his words of influence?
He started screaming. “But how did she know! She couldn’t have dreamt it. I couldn’t have dreamt it.”
Whatever the apple was—a drug, or something more mysterious—it kept me calm. Although, I thought he must be spending too much time with me if he was going on like that. It was as if I were listening to myself. Our tent boiled.
The smoke cleared. I’m older, the one in charge. I don’t feel that way. She has led me here. I don’t think she knows it, with her ironies and double-entendres. The way in which I’ve read her, her voice like a hall of closed doors.
In the tent, his hands were around my throat.
And he was a child, walking through the woods, speaking to me. Voices like birdsong flew from tree to tree.
He talked to the earth and the earth talked back, each susurration and rasp full of meaning. Nature spoke and he listened, it led him through the tangled canopies and tumbled brambles.
He was not me. He was himself. I was a boy, walking, seeing myself in the webs and dew around me, following the man I was about to become, calling out to him, hearing every footstep as an answer. I could never catch up to him. He would turn and hold an apple and take a bite. It was always then that I would wake to my wooden room full of spiders and flies and cry.
The morning signalled itself with the condensation on the canvas running, cold, to touch my skin, and the trees above shedding their tears to tap two-three on the tent. I was alone, shivering. Birds called in the distance. I tried to speak, but couldn’t find my language.
Outside, our campfire smouldered away.
Our parents had said, as they settled into their new home, not to go. They didn’t seem to mind that their solid ball of language was breaking up in the retirement village. They tried to explain this to me, and to you, before, but were worried about pushing us too far. I don’t know. It all just makes me want to hold on to what I have.
The kayak was still on the beach. He hadn’t left a note.
2023