The way she moved her hands.
So certain of where they were going.
Never doubtful of where they had been.
Lines crawled down her fingers and up her arms. They told a story, and if rearranged and sorted they could have told her story.
All the wrists twisting around doorknobs.
The tickets written.
The rear of an engine.
The scar that stretched from the thumbnail to the top of her wrist that mapped out her first motorcycle ride.
The bumps on her knuckles, callused from the rub of a lovesick pencil.
The brown speckles that spanned her skin like paint splatters.
The way her hands moved you got lost in the routine.
Fascinated with the way they flew from one task to the next, always holding a pen or a cup and only pausing for cigarette breaks.
"Something to take the edge off" she'd tell me, I never really understood that. Two fingers and a role of tobacco in between.
Once ahold of something she never let go.
It just became another fold in her skin.
Another wrinkle.
Her hands reminded me of clean laundry. Warm from a drier and creased with folded lines where sleeves met collars.
Like lines on notebook paper.
Lines that embraced words.
Words that evolved into sentences.
Sentences that evolved into poetry.
Poetry that Swayed from one word to another.
Dancing from one detail to the next.
Her hands waltz to the song of her life.
They told me stories as they flicked on light switches and poured coffee.
She sewed together whispers of her childhood.
She tickled her way into my ear as i listened to the silent mumble of her tapping fingers.
Her thoughts unfolded into questions that settle on shelves in her mind. Thoughtlessly she dusts them off and handed them to me.
But I did not know how to answer them, neither did she.
But she did know how to curl her hands around shoulders and arms and other hands, she knew how to answer a wave.
She knew how to embrace time.
She found certainty in her developments and I found certainty in the fact that she did not have all the answers.
