I think sometimes Ilya looks at his hands and tries to figure out how Irina's would fit in them.
He can remember her clasping his fingers in her own to pull him along when they were in large crowds or crossing the street. She'd squeeze sometimes and he'd wonder if she thought he was anxious and was trying to reassure him, or maybe she was feeling it and wanted something to cling to.
He can almost remember the sensation, though it's put together a little too logically now, cursed by conscious memory; where one is forced to acknowledge that nothing in their mind is a photograph or a full scene, preserved in clarity. It's a thousand tiny, diminishing and fading details, slotted together like an imperfect puzzle, always losing pieces.
He reminds himself that her hands were always cold, even before. In a different way, a breathing way, less scaly and distressing than they were after. Soft. But cold, yes. He tries not to let the after overshadow the before, and even so, it twists and taints his reminiscence.
He knows that her fingers were long and slender. How long, he couldn't say. Is it insane to wish for measurements? Some unalterable, unquestionable representation of what used to be. Wishing doesn't help now. It never has.
He thinks that when she was doing better her nails were neat and short, and when she was doing worse her thumbs were slightly ragged from nibbling and would grow longer before she could remember to tame them again. But maybe that's a fabrication. He can't ask her, or anyone else, to confirm.
The feelings he associates with it, he knows, are wrong. He didn't think about it then, or was vaguely annoyed. There was no absence to make him nostalgic for the contact. The sweetness and sorrow are new, painted over reality by a wistful, older version of himself.
Between the inconsistency of recollection and the imperfection of imagination, Ilya can't quite figure out how they'd fit. His hands were so much smaller then. They've kept growing, gaining more callouses, scars and bumps, becoming rougher. In a way they're a representation of all of him; he has changed so wholly from the boy she knew.
If Irina had lived, hers would probably be different too, now, wouldn't they? Perhaps not drastically, but surely at least a little. And isn't that some of the horror of it; that she is frozen as she was, unable to be anything more than she was, and the frost is obscuring her details with time. Everything is becoming fuzzy, indistinct, and so, so painfully frigid.
He doesn't get to know who she would have been. She doesn't get to know who he is.
At some point, the futility of it all strikes him. Ilya Rozanov, as he is, is irrevocably contextualized by the loss of his mother. Irina Rozanova, as she was, never knew an Ilya shadowed by that grief. The bones remain but are different now, the skin completely renewed, his physical tethers to that boy and his mother's touch diminishing. Their hands, as his are and hers were, will never fit. The closest he's ever been able to come is grasping at empty air, desperate to hold on to a memory.
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
titsay
turnnoffyourmind
