Story

I still have dreams about you sometimes. Hold on, this is probably going to come out wrong. But I still do, I dream about you. And I wake up feeling guilty and happy all at once. And alone, but not really. The way you feel when certain impossible things seem feasible, for a split second. Like how it could be feasible that you’d happily work a crappy dishwashing job as long as everything else in your life is in check. The moment when you reach in to the brackish water to unplug the drain for the fifth time in an hour and say to yourself “this is not so bad”. When you are completely neutral and feel nothing while you work one way or another. Time stands still. You could be this way forever.

Except for your hands. Your hands betray your age. They are your conduits to the outside world, they are affected and scarred by what they touch. These marks may be visible or may be misleading. The way you touch someone, the moment is recorded. Your fingers dig into his back. You always said I had feminine hands, beautiful but unnerving. Are my conduits faulty? Maybe they betray nothing. Is that what we want? The naked honesty you see in hands, people don’t try to cover it up. Most don’t realize it’s there. I hope you look at my hands and see everything I am too afraid to tell you. Everything that cannot be verbalized, no matter how articulate you are.

I thought about all this today at work. I imagined the exact moment I would put the thoughts on paper, and I thought about my dream, reviewed every detail. I can’t explain this dream. This is something you will have to decipher on your own. Take my hands in yours, examine them. You’ll probably find what you’re looking for.