hands: on trust

yeah, it’s been a bad bad week (and i am lucky as hell)

palms over your cuts. Tattooed on your heart is the tenet that you are still not broken, even though you can see the taped-over cracks and the glue, and the pinpricked hands still working needles through your wounds, stitching skin back to skin and making you over like a dilapidated house that wants so desperately to home someone new. There are laws against that for a reason, you discover one night, as another one of your rafters bows and threatens to break under the hacksaw slashing you. Hands take hammers and nails to you. They grab dusters and polish and scrape you back into shape, pin you up and deck you out in gloss shiny and new, throw back the curtains and the dust comes up like stars. You wonder if it’s fun for them, you wonder why they try so hard and then someone pushes their lips in your ear and says, beautiful, you can do better, and then it all comes to a thread-fine point that loops between your ribs and sets seed in the garden under your sternum. There are hands holding you together.

i. One cupping your shoulder; he’s keeping you in the crook of his elbow, fingers pressed tight into your arm because on this evening you are a liability. You are drunk and scribbly, clipped to a haphazard trot, leaning hard against him. You got the measure of this one, right away. He is small (and so are his hands) and he has a particularly beautiful smile that he definitely does not know about. You find in him the most precious thing: that he can make you laugh without trying, and his flat line of realism is more grounding than any mindless affection ever could be. You think he thinks you’re a wreck, as if that's a matter of opinion any more, but when you peel back a curtain of his you see that he’s not so all together either. Neither of you like to be alone. He pins his knuckles hard to you and is stable ground when you cry. You know you always feel too much but there is this one perfect truth: you do love him, completely. You don’t think you’ve ever wanted anyone to be happy as much as you do him. The word ‘brother’ crosses your mind now and then and you wonder what he’d think if he knew.

ii. God, it’s been a hell of a week. The room paints you up in colours and lights and you squeeze shut your eyes against the flashing only to feel another tiny hand in yours: there she is, the pretty little angel on your shoulder, keeping you on a leash that’s not so short that she can’t laugh at you when you humiliate yourself -- but just tight enough to keep you safe. There are small moments when you appreciate her most, these tiny pragmatic things, like when you haven’t eaten in four days and she hand-feeds you biscuits or when you have to stop in the middle of the street at three in the morning because suddenly everything hurts so much and you can barely even breathe and she just pulls you home under yellow lamplight with her tiny lily hands because honey come on, you’re going to get hypothermia: save your breakdown for bed, where she can tuck you in and pet your hair at least until you feel bandaged.

and fingers falling wrong. So, you weren’t right after all. You failed wholly and entirely. You didn’t just miss the boat: the whole damn harbour crumbled into the sea (and you don’t even know how to swim). There is no lesson to learn and you don’t think you did anything wrong, you’re just a bad luck bird, and you’re completely floored by how fast the whole thing collapsed. This next year? You two barely made it a week. Talking to yourself in the mirror in the middle of the night, drunk on wine, you are a contradiction: you don’t think there are any new lows to reach -- this is it, it’s the end of the road -- and yet you have the most beautiful hands piecing you back together, and when you finally clear your head, you think you’re going to make it.

Reviews

[TLK]

"The word ‘brother’ crosses your mind now and then and you wonder what he’d think if he knew."

You say just enough here for the meaning to pop off the page.



The whole piece is as stitched together by helpful hands as the situation describes: it is truly evocative.