an anthology of hands

Hello,

My clinic bills are now with the debt collector.

In February, I cut my pinkie on a wine glass. A girl, who I met for the first time only a few days prior, had an emotional breakdown on her couch while I tried to reassure her that her parents do indeed love her. Eventually, we cajoled her into changing into her pajamas, popping a Xanax, and lying down in bed. In a fit of good-doing, I decided to wash her wine glasses. One of them burst in my hand, and I had to steal a menstrual pad from her bathroom to stem the bleeding. Washing my hand over the kitchen sink, I watched the blood rush over the broken glass as a tiny flap of flesh emerged from beneath. It was 3am, and I went to the GW emergency room, which at 3am was a beacon for idiotic, night-time injuries. Now my clinic bills are with the debt collector, and I have a small, keloid scar on my pinkie finger.

While I could complain about the abysmal state of American healthcare, I want to talk my little scar instead. The thing is I kind of like it. The same way I like that my left middle finger is slightly crooked from when my grandma trapped it in the car window when I was a toddler. In a perverse way, I like that there are stories behind them. I like that, for better or for worse, our bodies carry physical proof for the course of living. Proof that we haven’t lived in a vacuum, that things happen to us.

One night in Paris, this girl asked to take a picture of us holding hands because she loved the entangled look of them. She claimed to be fascinated by hands, the shape of them, the accessories, the callouses, together and separate. She believed that her photos could communicate some secret power of being, some unspoken message of the universe. I wanted to sing her praises to the heavens because she understood.

I’ve always thought that if I could foster a collection of any one specific thing — a written anthology about any one concept — it would be hands. Hands work and hands hurt and hands love. They are the first part of us that reaches the rest of the world. They are the epitome of that attempt for connection. Everything about them — rings, scars, cracking knuckles, the way we hold a pen, or point at the sun — gives us away. They reveal more about the facts of our lives than a well-written memoir could ever hope to. But we still lay our clumsily wrought stories at another’s feet because hands may give us away but that doesn’t mean the things they wish to impart can be easily understood without an interpreter, and so we must wrestle through the translation of ‘us’ into words. Just our hands aren’t enough, but how I love them for trying.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Nelson collects blue — Cezanne and sea glass, flowers and paint swatches. She meditates upon the color, spends months thinking about little else. She mourns her ex-lover, who she refers to as the prince of blue, and she takes care of her friend, who has recently become quadriplegic. While this might sound disjointed or borderline pathological, she weaves together all these blue things into a work of poetry that reveals how her heart beats.

What would you foster a collection of?

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie