Your hands weren’t left aching after you typed this. They weren’t left bruised, stung, cut or throbbing, because they have already been that and anything else will just add to the stories. You are a human, a being, a headline to an article written about your life, and your hands saw everything that was written– they were there.
They began small, as you did, and both of them could fit splayed across your mother’s single hand. They lay stretched with paler skin in the middle, like webbed feet, by which you were fascinated. Being right-handed made you feel ordinary and webbed feet hands seemed to change that. Do you remember the bee perched on your palm when you were six, that you squished with the belief that you could close your fingers around it faster than it could sting you? You no longer overestimate your hands’ strength and speed. Seven years later, the wrinkles and ridges in your hands were traced by the those of the palm reader on your birthday. You realized that words from stringy-haired women with ten rings on ten fingers can rarely breed real expectations for the future.
You've been told you have long fingers, and when you played piano you were expected to hit the right keys because you could reach them all at once. You needed chocolate, however, carefully arranged in a line across the music stand for after you practiced. Do you remember the hand-shaped cutouts you stumbled into making in metal shop? Your thumbprint was altered, sliced across on the unfiled ridge of a metal finger. You regretted your lack of attention to detail then. Your hands, same year, were unwilling to wear the brass rings that left perfect blue marks circling your fingers. Twelve dollars for three blue splotches on the canvas that is your hands. That same canvas was, in what seemed to be a different lifetime, covered in drawings of musings, reminders and creatures scribbled in blue sharpie. People didn’t question the marks on the backs of your hands, but laughed at the scribbles on your knees, instead. “I needed to test if the pen had run out, and I was wearing a skirt,” you would reply, shoulders back, half the time. Your navy skirt was pulled down by your hands, four years, every day. It always rode up.
There are five blue veins you can squint and see at the tops of your hands, two on the left and three on the right, and more on each palm. There are three total freckles, one and a half hangnails, and one visible white scar across your thumbprint. You know the knuckles, but wonder what the smaller collections of wrinkles are called, sitting under your nails, the ones never able to fully bend that part of your finger.
You think of your life in the form of lists, and your hands are at the top of each regardless of the title. They know everything– because of the bee stings and scars, the wrinkles read by palm readers and the marks from moments when you wanted to scribble on a face but your pen found your hands first. The pen would land, instead, on the smoothest space between your thumb and index finger. Hands were there, through pins-and-needles in the middle of the night and scribbled words on their palms so you wouldn’t forget in the morning. Let the back of your hand be a map of freckles linking wrinkles. Your fingers will grow as your legs will. They have been worn to the bone and built back up again, stronger than they look, and because of their stories, your hands weren't left aching after you typed this.