Two Hearts One Soul

've toyed with the idea of managing two blogs. One to do with my life as a newfound adult in a new city with a job.

But this is more person(al). A look into work I began as a senior in college not too many months ago. It is raw. It is me. Try it out for size.

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Anatomy

“Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.”

–Frank Gillette Burgess

Hands

“I really wish I knew who you inherited your hands from. They look nothing like anyone’s hands from my side of the family.” My father slides his own hand, palm down, so my fingers lay a crossed his knuckles, but has nothing else to say.

Adolescence brings puberty and awareness into the body. Mine echoed, reverberated off the sides of my skull, sinking into my brain before I could make any sense of it. Others’ fingers, people I knew, were not long and slender like mine, did not have the lithe, bone thin curves. “ET fingers” my mother used to call them. Fingers that rings slipped off of or held loosely, fingers that I loved to hold palm to palm with boys.

“See? My hands are bigger than yours!”

“Nah, you just have super freaky, long digits, girl.” His hand would drop away from mine and my palm would be instantly cooled without his callused skin on mine. Sweaty palms of pre-teens, glistening where the lines curves and twisted on young skin, lines that gypsies read and would us where life would fail us.

*

It is still a mystery who I have inherited my hands from. They do not resemble my mother’s or fathers nor their parents. But I hope they age the way my grandmother’s hands have. I spent my childhood memorizing every part of them, the surface of her palms and the lines that undulate and swerve across her joints.

Hers are muted and pearly in the light, holding tranquility in her palms, weathered and worn.

Mine showing the beginnings of calluses from erosion on flesh from helping my father in the kitchen, kneading, scrubbing, dicing, the rub of kitchen tools on thin skin.

Her flesh with its balmy folds and puckers seems as if it has just been laid across her bones like paper mache.

Mine are like blown glass, Christmas ornaments, appear delicate and weak but are derived from heat, withstood oven burns, paper cuts and chapped winter air.

My grandmother’s palms trap scents of basil and mint from cooking supper or pulling weeds from her herb garden.

The tips of my fingers and the spaces between them absorb the scent of perfume from hurried spritzes out of the bottle and coffee when I sop up the foam from the bottom of a daily cappuccino. The dull hint of flowers and espresso beans lingers there all day. Sometimes I rest my hand across my mouth, just below my lower lip so I can inhale it.

Her knuckles are like uncultured pearls extracted from fresh oysters, silken with a dull sheen. The skin that stretches over them fades in hue when she makes a fist or curls her fingers around crochet hooks, iridescent in the wash of dull lamp light.

I like how easily my knuckles crack. Using my thumb as leverage, I push each finger into my palm until the joint readjusts with a satisfying pop. This habit makes some cringe and shiver, cover their ears.

“Your gorgeous hands are going to end up ruined and deformed like mine!” my mother shoves her hands under my nose. Her knuckles bulge from the center of her fingers that bend in odd angles. The ovals of her fingernails are misshapen and uneven. My mother’s hands remind me of pieces of shrapnel or knotted roots on an ancient tree. But I think they are beautiful in a way I think driftwood and beach glass is beautiful. Natural and weathered from earth. Imperfect, just like her mothers.

My grandmother’s hands have rivulets of indigo veins that I would squeeze between my small fingertips. I loved how they felt as I pressed them down, cutting off blood flow until I released them, blood filling them plump.

My blood vessels are only visible when I’m cold or vertical. Azure against olive flesh, thin and flowing like raindrop trails on a car window.

My grandmother would encase my hand in hers, enveloping it in a swaddle. I remember her hands always giving off an internal heat that never dulled.

My hands are made like hers, to rub and massage, kneed tense muscles on his torso, roll ovals into the fleshy part of his back with the heels of my palms, scrunch his shoulders with my fingers. I like how his muscles turn into something malleable like dough from the warmth of my hands, like silly putty or clay, allaying under the power of my exertion.

But I hate how they swell in the heat: how the rings that I feel naked without become just snug enough that I have to soap up my hand to slide them off. Typing, writing and cooking are a struggle when my fingers are engorged from summer humidity, refuse to bend, the skin across my knuckles will split open and ooze like blisters, become clumsy, fumble and falter even the most simple tasks like holding a pencil, brushing my teeth, painting my nails. The tool becomes entangled between the spaces of my fingers, falling to the floor or counter where I pick it up only to fumble again. And if I try to make a fist, or spay my fingers across the steering wheel of my car, my flesh stretches across my bones aches more than the joints themselves, like leather or sheep’s skin desiccated on a frame. I hate the hangnails and cracked edges of cuticles that fray near the bed of my nail so that I bite or tear at them until they bleed and well up with blood, until they are sore for days after and I have to rub Vaseline to alleviate and coax them.

Back, Shoulders, Neck:

My collarbone reminds me of the handle on a wooden spoon lying just below the skin that hugs it. I used to envy the wiry girls whose clavicles protrude across the span of their shoulders, holding thin necks straight like pedestals on which their heads balanced. But I’ve grown to like the thickness of my own, how the right side sits somewhat above the left, even when I remember to have good posture. If I crane my neck to either side to loosen tense muscles or glance behind my shoulder, my flesh stretches over the length of the bone that seems to keep my shoulders balanced.

I like the way thin straps from clothing or undergarments lie on the long bone and how the space at the center of my neck where the two clavicles meet is small and delicate. When I am nervous or catch a glance of an intriguing man across the room, I stroke that space with three fingers and let the back of back of my hand slide down the center of my chest.

When I sweat, the outline of my clavicle seems more pronounced where the flesh shines in the places the bone protrudes. This part of my body reminds me of photographs of tribal women in National Geographic, how their bodies are slight but sturdy like a stalk of corn. Survivalist, resilient women who adapt to their environment, become part of the earth.

My shoulder blades draw two diagonal lines that lead to my spine, protruding as if I’m a premature mystical creature with growing wings not yet developed, that they may push or tear through the flesh with a sharp, sudden movement.

There is a spot situated at the far left end of my left shoulder blade on the outline of the bone. A perfect dark circle as if the tip of a marker dotted my skin. The spot, a freckle maybe, moves when I shrug. I’ve claimed that spot as mine. I can make it move and I like to think no one else has a lone freckle placed in there.

All of my strength is concentrated into a pinpoint of the center of my back, to the left of my vertebrae, a tiny pulsing light inside of my body that grows brighter with the amount of vigor I need. It is the power source that feeds my overlapping muscles, striated patterns of tissue soaking up adrenaline, seeping into my limbs when my feet hit the pavement, when my hips sway, drawing ovals in the air when I dance, when my arms hook under his shoulders and clasp onto his bare back, balmy palms and fingers gripping the curve of his back when he is on top of me in the navy blue of a dark room.

My long torso bows and swells. The fluidity of how my flesh moves on top of muscle and bone reminds me of supple clay on a potter’s wheel, molded by careful hands, clay with an uneven surface of dimples and creases, imperfect and natural. After I emerge from the shower, I wrap a towel around my hips, slung low to sit on the frame of my waist and look over my shoulder in the mirror, the skin of my back slick from baby oil, bronze like a dull penny. I like to watch the light catch water droplets that drip from my cropped hair and onto the contours of my shoulders, watch how the water crawls down my back, slithering at an unsteady pace, drawing trails, squiggles of liquid until it reaches the small of my back and disappears.

Where the water left over from the shower collects is where my waist and hips meet, lower sinuating into a slight arch when I stand, forming a notch where men rest their fingertips, the same arch that becomes more severe when I’m lying on my back. It aches when his palm slides up the inside of my thigh, slow, methodical, purposeful, led by the soft knobs of his knuckles, then retracing the path back down with the arc of his pinky, stopping at my knee until my back is contracting against desire, willpower, onto my elbows so the power source glows red, a film of perspiration illuminating the contours of my muscles in the dim light. The small of my back arches into me to a point where my sides and pelvis ache, restraining the rest of me against what I want from him but know I will regret after our clothes have been retrieved off of the floor.

My spine is just barely outlined right beneath my skin a series of small cusps trailing from my neck to my hips. When I hug my knees, curl into myself at night sometimes I can still feel his fingertips ripple over my vertebrae.

There was red wine on my breath. We shared a bottle, that lie on its side on the floor and there is a small stain where he spilled on my sheets. I knew him through his touch and not much else. Conversing through grasping, pulling, caressing, gripping each other’s skin, the soft part of our bodies that welcomed foreign hands. That night I pretended to be asleep as he ran his index finger across the spread of my shoulders, down the crescent of my spine and over my ribs. His knuckle thumped over the notches and grooves of bone outlined through my skin.

“It’s like the skin on your back is so much thinner than anyone else’s I’ve ever seen, like it should be on the inside of your body, not outside protecting what’s in there.” He reached around and poked my side just below my ribs. He knew I wasn’t asleep. I could feel his hand spread across my back. It rose and fell with my inhales and exhales. “I can feel your bones when you breathe.” I shrugged and kept my back to him, uncurling myself slightly. He removed his hand traced my pronounced muscles with the pad of his thumb. “God, your back is like those sculptures you see in museums, you know the Greek ones made of marble or whatever? I never liked them, so unrealistic you know? But god, your back looks just like the back of one of those sculptures.” This struck me.

“Yeah? That’s new.” I reached around my waist and placed my hand on top of his, guiding it up to my shoulders. He squeezed the tense muscle that slopes down from my neck.

“I’m serious.” I turned over to face him. His fingers slid over my collarbone and down my chest

“Flip over.” His eyes questioned my request but he does it anyway, his back toward me. My knees always fit into the space where his bent in. He slept that way, curled into himself like me. “My grandmother used to draw words on my back and I’d have to guess what she wrote.” I traced squiggled down the center of his back following his spine

“That’s not a word.”

“I know, I’m thinking.” I scratched his back while I thought of a word. He liked that, made a murmured grunt like a dog. When I chose my word I took my pinky and traced the letters E-R-O-S diagonally near his waist. We talked about Greek mythology, the levels of love. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Eros. The lowest rung on the latter, infatuation, mindless physicality. Drives a person insane sometimes.