I don’t remember a lot about you, about us, I think maybe I’ve blocked it all out. I mean, I remember your face. How could I not? And, and…I remember…hands. I remember hands. I remember my hands touching your hands and your hands touching my face and my hair and my hands. I remember how you caressed them, traced the lines of my palm with your thumb until I laughed and swatted at you. Remember sitting in movie theater seats with your arm around my shoulder and your hand stroking my hair even though you told me later that it had fallen asleep while I was leaning on it. Once, you spent a long time just stroking my hands. You wanted to memorize them, you said. Every detail. From the bitten-down stubs of my nails, painted midnight blue, to the callouses on the tips of my fingers where they rubbed against the guitar. You used to watch me play guitar, too, remember? I would sit on the chair in your room and you would sit on the shiny, polished hardwood floor which didn’t have a rug and was cold in the winter but that was ok because you said you could see me better from down there anyway. And you would watch as my left hand would slide down the neck, how the fingers bent and contorted to fit the frets, how my right hand moved up and down, clasping the pick between thumb and pointer. Then you would laugh and take the guitar and pretend to play and it would sound so awful but it was a wonderful noise.
I never told you this, but while you were memorizing my hands, I was memorizing your face. You stared down so intently that you didn’t even see me, which was fine because really, it was a bit creepy. I gazed at every inch of your face, how your eyes crinkled when you laughed, how they were so dark and yet they were so full of light. How did you do that? How your mouth bent up even when you weren’t laughing and how even though we were young you already had laugh lines around your mouth which I used to laugh at and call you “old man.” I wanted to study you, to imprint your face into my mind so that I could look at it when I was sad and think about our hands and how they fit together so well and why don’t they fit anymore? There are empty spaces now between my fingers and the blue polish is peeling off and my fingers are soft because I can’t play the guitar without thinking of you. And your hands.