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“Saying her name, I feel the whole of her pass through my mouth, out between my teeth, across my lips, into the cabin of the truck, out the window, into the blue sky. My first and only love. Leaving me. And I know, somehow, that I won't say her name again. Because it hurts too much to yearn for a return.
I resign to her leaving my body, feeling that this is enough, to be witnessed by Dave, in the here and now, to have someone in this big wide world know that I loved her. That I loved her. That it was real.
I loved her so much, I say.”
― Dylin Hardcastle, A Language of Limbs

“I think sometimes of the "closet", the place, the word and its attachments. A closet, after all, is a small space. It exists within a home, but it is starved. There is no light in there, no air, no room to fuck, no place to sleep. It is safe, for a time, perhaps. But a body in there will erode. Until its flesh is all gone and it becomes a secret of bones. To come out is to escape the secret, to stretch your limbs and bathe your skin in light. Sometimes. Because to come out can also be a sharper death, a quicker death. Total obliteration.

Either way, to come out is always the end of something.”
― Dylin Hardcastle, A Language of Limbs

“(...) when we are outside, I learn the sick pleasure of almost kisses, of side glances and wanting smiles. I learn how pining starts between the thighs and spreads outwards, stomach clenched and fingers feeling like shallow light because all the blood is rushing out of them. And it's not that I haven't yearned before. This feeling has been long deep in me, but that now it is swollen with promise and fully realised.”
― Dylin Hardcastle, A Language of Limbs

“And she is aware too how very convenient it is to have found someone she wants to marry just at the moment in her life when getting married is expected of her. It is a relief not to have to marry someone for the sake of it, or to have to make a stand and marry nobody at all.”
― Nell Stevens, Briefly, A Delicious Life