This piece was first published in issue twenty-seven. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

There are words sometimes, or lines, that catch us. Ones that snap at us like unruly dogs, and ones that hound us, that follow us around. I was struck by a particular German phrase in conversation the other day. A friend who works in fashion was talking about what her colleagues eat on their lunch break and she said, “Sie passen alle gut auf ihre Linien auf.”

Sie passen auf ihre Linien auf. It means, literally, “They look after their lines.”

I don’t much care for the sense of this, the dieting, but I find myself very taken by the phrasing. They look after their lines. We do, don’t we? We take care of our lines. Our outlines. We don’t want to spill beyond the edges of our bodies. We want to keep ourselves taut, contained, contoured. We want to keep ourselves legible. We’re careful about that.

We are made from well-arranged sets of lines keeping us in place. Bones look like lines, mostly vertical. So do tendons. My veins do too, from this angle, tracing thinly purple along the length of my underarm. We measured our heights against the kitchen wall as children and then we ended up with lines too, of varying lengths, like a crowd of skinny sunflower stalks. A way to trace what our bodies were in their different stages. We drew around our shadows in the summer with chalk, trying not to smudge them. They faded by the next day.

One account of the origins of art has it that the very first painting was done by a young Greek maiden, tracing around the outline of her lover’s silhouette before he left for war: a scene almost identical to us chalking around our summer shadows as children. Representation begins with the tracing-out of a loved one’s outline, right before they leave and risk being forgotten. It’s an act of memory-work, a safeguard against loss. Silhouettes and cameos, all the rage in the nineteenth century before the invention of photography, were a similar kind of thing. A subject would pose in front of a screen and the artist would shoot a light at them from one side and trace around the edge of the shadow they cast. This kind of portrait preserved the sense of a person in monochrome, letting their outermost edge, their outline, do the work of representation. A picture to remember you by.

It’s a lonely-looking figure, a silhouette. We lose the detail of the body in its colour, in skin, in flesh, the kind of flesh that expands and ripples in a way that makes it hard to hold on to, hard to recognise. Age and loss can make a face hard to remember. But we keep hold of our outlines.

I’ve caught myself thinking, before, that greyhounds look like lines come to life, all speed and sinew. There are other lines we care about. The distinctive outlines of other shapes. Map lines. Our train lines home. Coastlines threatened by erosion. Lines from nursery rhymes, the ones that stick in our heads when the rest of the song won’t. Our favourite plotlines, over and over, remembered without the detail. Lifelines. I wonder whether there is any sense to palm reading.

I guess it’s what I’m doing here too, isn’t it, in writing to you. Inking lines. Tracing around a subject without quite facing it. Ich passe auf meine Linien auf. I’m looking after these lines, for you, so that I might remember.

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