Hello / Goodbye
1.
First film was The Incredibles, enormous characters in Elastigirl, Frozone, Jack-Jack Parr and him, an adult baby in the seat next to me. He might not’ve blinked the entire time, slept three and a half hours that afternoon. Then, months later, when asked if he liked the movie, he began at the beginning and walked in circles, talking his pidgin in a straight line.
2.
Most days brain-heavy and neuronic, he wobbled from all that sped his way, and I, wondering what he dreamed at night, aimed to be his pillow.
3.
He used to sit on the desk, straight-backed chair redundant in its waiting for his small body, a puzzle piece stuck to his shin. The puzzle piece, the loose shavings fallen to the floor, his attempts and tiny failures – all incentive to carry on.
4.
Sometimes, when I looked at him amid his siblings’ hallway protests, the frypan song, the bench mess and blinding lights, I was already thinking of him.
5.
How’d he get those sunlit eyes that saw glitter in dirt then searched for its scientific name? He listened to the earth in its urgent pleading, its rasping and squawking because it, like him, was a feral thing and it, too, was afraid. Soft warrior with plant-shaped heart, he wished he could call the glitter mica but knew it was aluminium and plastic.
6.
That Gorillaz song he played on the piano, that Beatles song, the Beach Boys one, the one he made up about love, that Elton John and Kiki Dee that’s pretty jazzy when you take away the lyrics. Contrary to what you think this means, sometimes his music was political.
7.
Radiant child studying and breaking to post about Uyghur sterilisation, ethical, thirsty, a glass of milk beside a bubbleheaded Chris Hemsworth marketed as Thor, a green plate full of paint, Keith Haring doodles in an A4 pad, the coking of coal, the bleaching of reefs, the Amazon burning, the grazing cattle, my son listening to T. Rex’s Mambo Sun for the very first time and some Haring-mass beginning to fall onto his back, bent and stretched like a mountain range being pelted by their alligator rain, the strum in time to the Haring-mass pulling its slippery self onto the centre of his disco.
8.
Art. Art. Art. Art.
9.
I would like to meet him in the Post-Impressionist wing or at the abstract painting. I would like to meet him in front of a photo of Keith Haring. I would like to meet him in Melbourne for brunch. I would like to meet him at a kiosk on top of a mountain, or by a lake where we could talk about the clouds reflecting on the lake. I would like to meet him at the untended garden. I would like to re-meet him. I would like to meet him at our dog’s memorial. I would like us to meet at a monolith and selfie it. I would like to meet him at the cinema with a box of popcorn, three rows from the back or at the Gov – he can chose the band. Or a karaoke bar – I’ll choose the first song, probably that one by Elton John and Kiki Dee. I would like to meet him in another country – Vietnam, Kenya, Cuba – where we’d learn new words of greeting and farewell: hola / adios; hujambo / uende salama; chào / chào.
10.
“Hello!”
“Hello.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Heather Taylor-Johnson writes on Kaurna land, where she received an Arts Fellowship to write essays on the body in states of transition. Her sixth book of poetry is Alternative Hollywood Ending, and before that a verse novel called Rhymes with Hyenas. Her third novel is a work of autofiction called Little Bit and has just been published.
Locative Magazine 