Metamorphosis
by Kavita Bedford
Kavita is one of our Writer's Residency finalists and will be published in our upcoming Anthology later this month. Read more about the program - and meet all the finalists - here.
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In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I
The man I love, loves to climb rocks. I call him the mountain goat, and he has come to resemble this animal for me in many ways. His beard is curly and wiry to touch. His physique is lean and sinewy. He moves in angles, and in the city he looks lost. He walks all elbows and knees, like a colt who is testing the ground for the first time. When he goes in for an embrace, it is not with hands or lips leading, he moves head first. But when he is on the face of a rock, he moves with precision and grace, like some limestone dancer.
I know that his being needs the mountains. But each weekend, when he packs his bag of ropes and shoes and carabiner clips in the dawn half-light, I feel his act of leaving.
This world he inhabits seems so far from the little studio we share by the river in the city. His is a land with its own language of crimps, jugs, overhangs, finger holds. A lexicon made of hooks, crux and beta. Shale, sandstone, rock, vertebrae. Words to which I have little access.
His world thrives on adrenalin and heights. Yet beneath it is something so sturdy and reassuring in the rock; so different from my seemingly quiet river life with its watery, subterranean emotional movement.
On some days I feel huge admiration and sense his sovereignty: A Man with a Kingdom. There can be something thrillingly erotic about it, watching these men press themselves against the escarpment. But when I mention that to him, he laughs or rolls his eyes.
On other days I can’t handle his restlessness. It is the kind of restless that can only be tempered by doing something physically demanding, like clinging to rocks. His hands are calloused and his body is replete with cuts and bruises from the hours in which he tries to shift his shape into the elements.
You have rocks in your head, I say to him.
The people that belong to his mountain-world speak of it with a gleam of fervour in the eyes, like the recently converted. They replay the scenes from the day; mapping their movements across the cliff face; the internal struggles of meeting their summits; and where, and how and, oh, when again? Tomorrow?
The post-analysis, the obsessive attention to details, the emotional arc and the dreaming of when to see it again - it is nothing short of love. It is a love that sometimes makes me envious. Because there is no doubt that the mountains have become the landscape of our relationship, and they feel like a third unwanted presence.
He and I can defy each other in our very existence. There are days when it feels like we are ancient enemies. Drawing our battle lines and challenging the other. He feels like hard angled lines trying to dissect my soft wavering undulations. But on the gentler days, it feels like we are two parts of a puzzle, coming together and trying desperately to learn and grow. It is a constant dance. When I open my eyes each morning in the quasi-light, it is unclear whether he will be in the same bed as me or not.
While he is away, I go into self-care mode. I try to read, create words on a page, see a friend for tea, talk to my family over the phone and commune with the water.
At night, I read Rachel Cusk write about the mountains and the oceans”
‘the relationship between the two is more dramatic, and dramatised, the limestone sculpted into extraordinary shapes by the pressing, insistent water, which is forever harassing and caressing its rocky mate, half predator and half lover.’
I think about the different ways I wear him down and how we try to change the elements of our lovers.
There is something primordial, mythic, about his obsession. The Greeks understood this. It is the energy contained within a form. When I watch these climbers, I am struck by the act of mutability. I observe these creatures of soft-tissue and blood, desperately pushing and contorting into the cliff face.
The tales of Metamorphosis that I know are filled with love and violence. The males change their form to consume and take the female. The females pray to the goddesses to escape. My lover dreams of augmenting his body into rocks.
When he returns after a weekend of climbing, his fingers twitch, a spasmodic release from the muscles. I slip into visions of mountain-scapes and wild terrains that I cannot climb, and feel rock around us grow. And I know that the shape-shifting between us is almost complete.