The Hands Of A Loved One

Illustration by Katie Hillier

“Write about the hands of someone you love,” said the long-fingered, consistently antsy, beautiful mess sitting across the table, embracing her cup of decaf coffee. She stared at her tiny reflection in the brown, heavily sweetened liquid, as if it was the only thing in the room. The diner was quiet, we were quiet, but the world outside was anything but. Rain collided with the concrete and cars passed by, driven by people I’ll never meet as if I were a body beneath a gravestone and the diner was the cemetery along a highway. The groans and growls of the wind where unsuccessfully drowned out by Long Fingers cracking her oddly large knuckles or the voice of the waitress laughing in the back as she flirts with the kitchen staff. 

Write about the hands of someone you love. I never responded. We sat in silence, drinking our coffee and staring into the night, watching the reflection of the diner’s neon sign shapeshift by the rain connecting with the surface of the puddles. The storm outside was disturbingly peaceful like the theory of what follows after a beating heart comes to an indefinite halt. I couldn’t help but wonder what made my long-fingered companion think of such a thing to write about. What makes the hands of a loved one important enough to write about? Is it solely the fact that they are what embraces you, makes things for you, holds things for you, does things for you? Maybe it’s because hands and the meaning of hands hold so much more value then we give them credit for.

I spent many minutes that night sitting in the quaint university town diner with my eyes closed, watching the colours forming in the darkness across my eyelids, trying to picture my mother’s hands. Long Fingers read her book. It’s harder than you think to picture someone’s hands, the crevasses and years of use tugging and scarring on the skin, showing no mercy for the vain. I thought of the hands that bathed me, fed me, dressed me, and loved me. My mother’s hands that I’ve watched grow older, I could not picture. I could only imagine silhouetted fingers and palms. I could see the size and shape, but not what made her hands hers, as if I was only remembering the start and end of a dream, missing the in-between, the content that made it what it was.

Long Fingers tapped the tip of her index finger on the plastic table, creating a dull rhythmic thudding from the lack of fingernail. Anxiety, it makes her chew. I opened my eyes to see hers staring back at me, tears rolled down her freckled cheeks coated in cheap drugstore blush giving her a permanent appearance of slight embarrassment. She laughed. Her favourite character had died. I held her warm hands in between mine and told her she’d be okay; it was only a book. She thanked me with her eyes and the rub of her pale finger across the top of mine. “What are friends for?”, I responded. Her hands began to sweat, and we dislodged our grasp.

The opening of the front door was accompanied by busy outside sounds that became exemplified as they were escorted inside by a new customer. The bustling noise of light traffic and a distant laugh from somewhere near softened as quickly as it came with the closing of the door, sheltering the older man from the elements. He dripped water on the floor as he waltzed to a far corner table towards the back of the diner. His head was lowered, watching his feet with what appeared to be as much trust as one might have with their back turned to their sibling at the edge of a diving board. The new customer was older, reminding me of my father. Again, I closed my eyes, this time challenging my mind to picture my father’s hands. Darkness. The memory of my father’s hands was suppressed and forgotten, just as many of my childhood memories with him. Long Fingers stuck her index finger in her coffee, swirling the liquid around in circles in the absence of a spoon. When she pulled it out the coffee embraced the deep lines of her skin, but quickly pooled down into one drop that she let fall back into the mug as if germs and COVID-19 weren’t a thing.

Watching her use her hands in replacement of a spoon made me think about hands more deeply than I ever had. They are intimate and crucial, yet so easily overlooked. We are constantly using our hands to brush our hair or to tend to minor cuts and bruises or to embrace a loved one. We wouldn’t be ourselves without our hands. They carry us, we don’t carry them. They built the Roman Empire and wrote the Holy Bible. They buried our grandparents and birthed our siblings. Our world wouldn’t be our world without them. Try and remember the hands of your loved ones, as one day the pleasure of holding them or watching them hold you will no longer be yours, but someone’s beyond the veil between life and death. Take a mental note of the way their fingers curve, or the placement of the veins that lay just beneath the skin. What do they do with their hands, do they stick them in their coffee or tap them on tables? Do they use them to flip the pages of their favourite book, reread so many times you're embarrassed by the state of it every time they pull it out in public? Hands, such a mundane and dull concept, yet only now am I realizing how much meaning and power they hold. Use them wisely as they have both the same amount of potential to create as they do destroy, to love as much as they hate, and to hurt as much as they cure.

Write about the hands of someone you love, she said. I struggled with what to write until I realized this whole time, I was doing exactly what she asked of me.