dead hands

i have always wanted to be loved a certain way; have always had visceral ideals in mind. very specifically, i wanted hands that were active — present in the touch, alert on my skin, alive to me, capable of transmitting incarnate love. for a long time i did not find them. what i found, over and over, were limp hands. dead hands, as i codified them to my girlfriends after dates. they arrived where they were supposed to arrive, following a memorized choreography, but operated somewhere south of presence. or, in moments meant to be a soft passion but closer to grasping, gripping, the same hands turned aggressive — not desire, exactly, but the wrong thing wearing desire’s costume. neither was love. they were the same hands in different moods, belonging to a man who was not, in any meaningful sense, in his own body. you can be touched by these hands for years and still be alone in a room.

what i am describing is a disembodiment. a stifling and tainting of what should run from brain to heart to hand, so that the hand still arrives but arrives empty. the man inside the hand has become woefully numb — immune to his own heart — and the immunity transmits down the arm. the hand makes the gestures of intimacy. the woman receiving the touch feels through them. she feels the numbness of his heart in the indifference of his palm, in the pathetic curl of his fingers. the receiving body is, on this question, a more honest instrument than any words the man could say.

a hand attached, technically, to a person — but the person was elsewhere. missing. void. some part of him maybe still in the office, or in the algorithm of his phone, or floating in a future he had not yet earned the right to live in. or perhaps he was trapped behind the glass, condemned to voyerism. watching himself. watching me. the hand was where he could afford to be when he could not afford to be anywhere whole. or maybe he was nowhere at all. lost, and gone forever.

then i met a man whose hand carried him into it, and i understood that everything before had been a hand operating alone. and that this want of mine existed for a reason other than platonic ideal and self-torture. i do not know what to call the thing that is different now. brain-to-hand connection. heart-to-hand connection, maybe. the integration of a person into the body they are walking around in. into the soul residing within them. there might be a precise term and i do not know it. what i know is that when this man puts his palm on my cheek and his fingers around my neck, the hand is him. all of him. there is nothing else happening in his body or his head that is not also happening in the hand. the hand is the latest dispatch from a man who is in this room, and the dispatch arrives intact, with the seals unbroken.

the alive hand is different in a way that is difficult to articulate, because the difference is not in the hand itself. the hand is the same machine. five fingers, a palm, the small bones, the nerves. the alive hand operates on the same hardware as the dead one. but somewhere between the brainstem and the wrist, in the alive hand, an unbroken chain of attention is delivered down the arm. the hand is the last terminal of the chain. the dead hand is the same terminal with the chain severed somewhere in the chest.

his hands know me. and his touch is to touch me — not for his hands to feel me, but for my experience to feel his touch. it is a transfusion of his love into me to experience.

i am aware that the language of this is going to sound like a love poem, because that is what this is. but like, an anthropological love poem. i am writing it down because i did not trust it was possible until it happened to me, and i want a record of having found it — in case anything ever happens to me that makes me forget. or someone in the universe wants very specific proof that this exists. i want it to be on paper that i lived in a year where a man’s hand was a hand i could feel him in.

i have long known the question has always been whether a man could be truly capable of loving me — of the task at hand that is the labor of loving me — whether the wiring was there, whether the attention had been trained into the body, whether the heart and the brain and the hand were all parts of the same person rather than three houses with adjoining walls but no doorways between them. you can want all kinds of things you do not have the wiring to do.

i did not stop asking. or actually, more honestly, i did stop asking, for a long time, and then i started asking again, and then i met this man, and the hand arrived and the hand was him and i recognized what i had been asking for, all this time.