Your Body Is My Phantom Limb
by Katharina Mohr
Let me hide your body between words, cut you with commas, question your existence in marks. I’ll cut you from my history, so your bones echo a memory and your body is a blade whose fibres I’ll chop. This is a farewell letter.
#
We cling to the bus stop at 3:35 a.m. Frost eats the neon LED display above us, letters scurrying through darkness. You puff smoke against snow. Line 5 to Hamburg-Altona in two hours; until then only gloom and your rattling breath. Ice rain licks my cheeks. A street light flickers to the left, illuminates your face like a crescent moon. Smoulder hits my jawbone and simmers into my pores. I’d exchange five cigarettes of second-hand smoke for a night of your presence.
I forget the sensation of fingertips against your collarbones. I caress a body of air. The roots of your hair still taste of nicotine and blue paints down your spine like watercolours. Your ribs cracked once, twice, then the pediatrician’s fluorescent light, his corneal fingers against your scraped cheeks. You skipped one ladder rung to our childhood treehouse, fell. Your flesh slammed against the asphalt path. Didn’t it, didn’t you?
Our breaths mimic the snow blankets, their strange uniformity, individual particles that scoop a whole. The street is deserted, erased by white, tire tracks numbed by flakes. Neighbourhood only exists behind closed shutters with blackness behind, because neighbours never see, have never seen. Mid-range cars park at equal intervals, snow hoods on their roofs. When was the last time I was so alone?
#
I’ll say goodbye because you exist. Every morning I wake up on a new sofa and your body glows next to mine, new dust against my eyelids, a new lover, new aftertastes, and new shade of salt. Whenever your body breaks, sweat hisses on my temples, though your body can’t break anymore.
#
During the last summer at home, you wore the same azure t-shirt, oversized, colours faded, see-through at the waist, sweat rims under your armpits like grey crescents. You never took it off, although you used to skin every fabric from you, used to let the sun pierce your skin. It happened after we saw the soccer game, no interesting game, a usual SV Hamburg game, meaning a losing-every-game game, nothing more than a running gag. You left like an eggshell and returned with a sunflower beneath your right breast: black ink, red edges.
The game happened on the television in our kitchen. Dust spiraled over its surface, the players all spotty, their faces hidden like ghosts. At halftime, papa dredged salmon trout, its flesh oily, sizzling against the aluminium pan. Chili steam, suction of the extractor hood. I coughed. I remember I coughed but maybe I winced. I don’t remember your offense, but maybe you coughed, too. Papa dragged you by your curls. SV Hamburg was relegated. The players lay on their backs, grass biting into their shirts. Bengal fires eat the stadium, salmon-coloured smoke smothering us.
The door frame smashed your kneecap, the fish whirred, the kitchen clock ticked between your pleading, your screaming, your sobbing. I folded my hands, but didn’t look at them, because only your abandonment created the body I didn’t want to own.
#
This is a farewell without a letter. This is a goodbye without goodbye.
I take three steps and turn, caress my snow tracks, sense their grooves, the teeth, the blades. My fingers are wet. Silver firs lean against mist; their tops disassembled. A cape crow spheres, shrieks, then elapses.
You close your eyelids, blow ashes. Disembodied rings shatter against sleet. As I walk, I count the things that unite us, subtract what separates us. I calculate three and a half, but how much does our body count, weighed by a name?
Things that connect us: Womb, umbilical cord, split by two. At five years old, we smashed our closet mirror, because the reflections glistened identically: We stopped another cell division. Bone structure. I don’t own mirrors. As I shower, I lower my eyes, watch foam and dirt and water vanish in the drain. Identical dark hair in the strainer. I take polaroid selfies and black out my face. Pale skin, ridged cheeks, under-eye shadows, shadows under ribs.
Things that separate us: a name, a life, genitals and veins that spider-web across your shoulders and weave the strands of ink of your tattoos. You drew a map of pain onto your body, but I imprinted mine inside, its teeth against my flesh, consuming me, re-digesting.
Every day, I stop outside the tattoo studio next to the bodega. I press hands against the windowpane until my breath darkens a full moon onto it. Ink wouldn’t last on my skin. When I stamp vines onto my arm, the memory of you slips into my vision. You’re an indirect reflection. To feel pain, one needs to grow tendons, veins, bones.
#
Blue spruces munch on the lantern shrines of your fiancé’s row house. Snow suffocates darkness, a mud-green polo in the driveway, its gear window cracked, a handwritten note fixed behind the windshield wipers. Its body quivers in spikes of wind, punches the window. I axe its clammy body to shreds and seep them through my fingers.
Viola opens the door, although it’s 4 a.m. She pens a non-lit cigarette between her lips. Eyeliner crusts under her eyes. Her body darts into my arms, but doesn’t anchor in my shoulders. She’s always seen us as two parts of a whole: Our cells never split, conjoined twins, not by flesh but breath.
She calls me by your name, and I follow her down the hall, dining room, covered terrace, which is no more than a square of soil beneath a glass roof. Three worn-out couches crowd around a glass table and cracks vein through its surface like lightning in humid summer nights. We sit against the wood. Cold struts cut my spine, but I press against them as if I can melt by tension alone.
For your seventeenth birthday I gave you nothing and you gave me a book of Greek mythology, translated into German. I only read one story from it, Plato’s Symposium, where he hardened a myth into fiction, burned fiction into truth: Human bodies used to grow with two heads, four arms, four legs, could not be whole without their mirrored self. Then Zeus parted wholeness and created soulmates, which recognized each other by opposite names. If I called you by mine, would you call me by yours? We’re siblings, not lovers, but also mirrors. Will our bones link again, when Viola calls me by your name, calls you by yours? Because after all, we must’ve chipped from your body, not mine.
Cigarettes smoulder against the ashtray. Viola fumes nicotine into her lungs, the afterglow tiny as a firefly. I fumble a soaked butt from my pocket, toss it into the piles that shimmer white, as if it will also soften with snow, seep with water into the earth and flux with darkness into the woods.
We can’t go on like this, Viola says. Smoke breaks between her lips. She cuts the web of memories I’ve carefully crafted, with each string a link into your body. My veins bulge through my knuckles. I’m back at the bus stop, back in our kitchen with burning salmon, back in the womb we shared until birth cut us apart; and your body’s existence erased mine.
Viola’s garden fence frays against fir trees. A pigeon coos three times. From the right, light filters through blinds and bars our chests. Women’s voices from the television throb through the tilted patio window, because Viola would never allow silence, would also never shatter it. Maybe that’s why we’re made from the same mould. Maybe that’s why she touches my body like yours, kisses me like you’d kiss a corpse goodbye.
#
I try holding a ghost, I try squeezing air. I knit myself with smoke to confirm my corporeality. If Viola is less of a body than me, I’m flesh. If she’s more, I’m gone. Her hips press against my belly, her feet sand my thighs, my hair electrified by her movements. I lick salt off her lips. She scratches my back and the next morning I polaroid seven streaks of blood like evidence, proof I’m solid, permanent. Our genitals click into each other and we taste the profanity of human acts. On her nightstand, the alarm clock pulses, its numbers neon. Sweat trips from my forehead and hits her cheek.
We cease when ice crystals illuminate against the windows and pale light cuts our nudity. Viola lapses under the blanket, a film of sweat grasping her ribs. I stroke her body—a final confirmation. When her breath is steady, I leave. Before I go, I look at her, at your presence, absence. Presence in absence.
Outside, I grab a handful of ice crystals, but they disappear by touch, dematerializing like me, like you. Your trauma has infected your body, but it left me with famine of pain. Don’t let me melt, don’t let me burn; don’t let my body kaleidoscope in memories.
#
I return to the bus stop, eyelids pressed. You don’t wait for me there, but how could you? I sink against the bench, my clothes cold against my skin. Rays of sun rise over rooftops and breath into chimney smoke. All roads lead to this bus stop. You were the twin who tethered to life instead of floating above. You were made of stone, while I consist of dust. Your body magnetised me to the ground.
Three months ago, you overdosed. Oxytocin. Letters blur my memories instead of memories, commas burning your corpse, exclamation points marking your silence. At your funeral, I clicked open the urn, a plain black bottle, and trickled your ashes through my fingers. Your body escaped my touch. I’m forming your organs from memories, your hair from smoke. You’re not a hallucination, only a remembrance of gravity.
A bus appears after all. The engine hums like an invitation to the familiarity of a nursery rhyme. I stroke the glass of the bus stop wall and think about smashing it.
You can’t have a farewell without existence.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Katharina Mohr (they/she) is a 24-year-old queer poet and fiction writer, based in Germany. They are currently pursuing a dual Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Comparative Literature Studies at a German University. They mostly write when it’s dark or when it’s snowing—preferably both. You can find them on Instagram at @firekatefly.