Her Hands Are Always the Same

Her hands are always the same, soft and firm as old well-worn leather and covered with fine traceries of scars. Some of the scars you recognize—the finger she almost lost slicing onions when she laughed too hard at one of your jokes, the scattered dots where bees objected to her plucking a chunk of honeycomb, the shiny burn-scars on her fingertips that she’d had to beg your help with. Most of them you do not. She was already ancient when you first met.

She changes bodies so easily, shifting with her mood and the seasons and the fashions. Formal bodies dense with ornamentation, and soft bodies for days spent lounging, and patchwork ones for workings best left undone. Her closet must be a crowded nightmare, though she’s never let you see it. Nothing like yours. You barely afford one body, keep on mortgaging its future to make rent, struggle to wring a few more weeks of function from joints already stiff and worn.

Sometimes you think of asking her what she does with her old bodies. The one with fiery hair and tiger-striped sides that she hasn’t worn since that morning at the bar, when she got into a distressingly public fight with her ex; the spindly one with arms like sticks and a sandhill crane tattoo wrapped around its chest that you’ve only ever seen her wear when she needs to clean her house’s drains. Perhaps they’re piled in a closet somewhere, gathering dust; perhaps she’d let you have one if you asked. A hand-me-down.

You don’t ask, though.

Just like you’ve never asked exactly what you have, exactly what your relationship is. Certainly your friends draw conclusions; you spend more days with her than you do in your own coffin, and it would be hard to miss the looks you give her or the way you cling to her side.

It hurts when one of them calls her your girlfriend. It hurts more when one of them asks whether it’s official yet, though by now your closest friends all know that some questions shouldn’t be given voice.

You’re a coward.

You know that.

But you still can’t bring yourself to risk what you have by forcing a name onto it, still can’t bring yourself to ask those little questions that loom so large.

“What are we?”, you don’t say, chopping carrots for dinner.

“I love you,” you think, as she rests her hand on your neck and you melt into the touch. “I’d do anything for you.”

Such are the contours of your relationship, those moments of aching softness shrouded in jagged mist. Perhaps you could ask; perhaps she is a coward too, waiting for you to make the first move, unwilling to upset the balance. Perhaps she’s waiting to find the right body, the right moment, the right words …

Perhaps she’s just using you.

You promise yourself that someday you’ll find out. Someday you’ll scrounge together enough bravery to learn whether what you have is simply inertia and habit. But not yet. Not today.

Today you’ll just smile at the body she’s wearing, at the way its hips sway as she walks and the little moue its lips make as she sips her glass of wine. You’ll nurture that warm feeling in your chest that grows with every affectionate touch and every kind word, knowing that someday love will break you.

Coward.