They say you cannot miss what you have never had, but I know that is a lie, because I miss your hands. Your hands have never been within three and a half thousand miles of mine. Right now, they are further away than I can comprehend (the girl who cannot run three miles without tears, bribes, blisters) but my hands yearn for yours in a way that makes me want to believe in reincarnation.
I believe that I know your hands. I close my eyes and could draw your fingerprints from my imagination; each whirl a promise you couldn’t keep, each loop a conversation we didn’t have. If I could re-write the truth of your prints, I would, until your dips match mine, until we are identical down to the last millimetre. Maybe then we would hear each other.
If I had the chance to, I would worship your hands. Inspect every crease in the skin, learn the lines on your palm until it doesn’t matter if they are clenched in anger or reaching out in offering, I know what is coming next. I would use the ball of my thumb to find the pulse of your wrist, counting the beats of your heart until my breathing is matching your duh-dun, duh-dun. My fingertips would trace the moon of your nails, finding the boundary between skin and keratin and committing it to memory. Bend each finger at the knuckle, stroke the angles, watch them unfurl like leaves in the springtime. My fingers would dance in the spaces between your fingers, feeling the caress of skin that is only touched by lovers. They would not stay. They believe they would not be welcome.
My palm would graze your palm over and over and over again, sliding from pollex to index to pinky in an approximation of the way we ask babies if they are finished; ‘all done’. Are we all done? Will the first and last time I touch your hands be in a handshake, that damning western greeting that signifies respect, but only if you’re confident, strong enough? Or will our hands become accustomed to one another; will our digits fill the empty spaces of the other so permanently that your wedding ring leaves indentations on my finger?
Right now, your hands dance over a keyboard to a rhythm I cannot hear. The only evidence I have of your existence at all is your hands, the stories they tell me, the lines they recite around the bonfire that is my inbox. When I see my message has been read and there is no reply, I fall asleep, dreaming not of your face, but of your hands.
