These Hands

When you look at your palms, what stories do they hold?

These are the questions I have been asking myself this week.

Have you ever asked yourself..

What work have they done when no one was watching?

What have they built, held together long past the point of ease?

What children have they carried?

Have they poured tea for someone who needed to talk?

Have they painted pictures that never left the room?

Do they make space for the next thing to arrive?

Have they sifted sand slowly, letting time pass grain by grain?

Have they learned the language of stones, smooth, ocean-washed, patient with history?

What strength lives quietly in your fingertips?

What endurance is braided into your knuckles?

Do they know where to soften, where to stay?

Your hands remember what your mouth forgets.

My hands carry proof of who I’ve been and who I keep choosing to be; my stories are written in them, in the lines I never thought I would read

I lift them and really look at them. These used up, old hands. The ones that earned every wrinkle.

Mu palms, hold everything that never made it into the story that I've told, whenever someone asks how I'm doing?

They hold the warm names, heavy names, gone names and names that have left me with flaky skin.

My grief learned my fingerprints before I had a word for it, before anyone told me what was happening to me, sadness that began and ended, pain that left residue.

My hands.. have washed dishes that were never just dishes. They were fights rinsed quiet. They were apologies swallowed, love translated into soap and water because nobody taught me any other language.

These hands served coffee to strangers, they poured drinks for friends who needed a reason to stay sitting, wiped counters, wiped mouths, wiped tears, made space again and again for the next thing to arrive.

These hands held children, don’t rush this part — held children that were heavy with sleep, with sticky fingers, sometimes shaking with fear too big for their small, brave little chests.

These hands learned how to be still without disappearing, learned how to let go without leaving, how to hold the weight and not turn it into resentment.. most days. 

My strength has crept into my palms quietly, settled into my fingertips, braided itself into my knuckles, stored itself in places no one has thought to look until it’s all thats been left. 

My hands learned to map my life where to linger, where to soften, where to stay, even when staying was the courageous thing to do.

my hands have brushed hair back from eyes, like blessings they didn’t realise i were giving. They pressed themselves into spines, hugged love out of the tension, they tried to proved without preaching, letting their ache sink in.

Do you see it yet?

How none of this is ordinary. How none of this is separate.  Touch is history, endurance is prayer even when no one calls it that. 

Your hands remember what your mouth learned to survive without saying, they keep a living record when language collapsed, your hands carry the proof.. 

of who you were supposed to be, of who you kept choosing to be when it would’ve been easier to go numb again,

And again,

And again.

So before you leave this post, before you clap, or scroll, or move on like this didn’t touch you.

Look again, at what stories are written there in your own skin..  The skin you ’re still living in?What have your hands held, that still lives in you?

What have you endured?

And what,

even now,

even here..

is still being chosen?