On Hands

By Jon Chopan

Columbus, Ohio

 

Her fingers are long and slim and exotic. I watch her for the first time as she prepares to tattoo someone. I am enchanted by how confidently she moves, like that first night we met, her high heel dangling from her foot as she sat on her front steps cross-legged, waiting for my arrival. Even then I noticed her hands, the way her wrist bent as she pulled her cigarette from her lips and blew smoke out at me. She said “Hello, Mr. Chopan,” like she had been sitting on that step, waiting for me for forever.

Months later I marvel at the way she fusses with her hands when she is working on a stencil. Tattooing is both something she is drawn to and something she loathes. It is art but it is work. And this is a kind of love she is practicing, a kind of attrition. I sit on the couch starring at her as she works the pencil deep into the paper, making the lines solid, smooth. She fiddles with her hair and mouths the eraser from time to time. I think about how her hands reveal so much about her mind, how I know her worry or excitement by their movement.  They are, when she is excited, like humming birds flashing at her sides.  Then to I am reminded of that first night when she pushed me into her bed. “It is so strange finally having you here,” she said. She pinned me there and looked down at me, as if I were a hostage she was toying with, and I could feel the strength in every finger as they held me tightly against escape.

What I mean to say about hands, about this woman’s hands, is how important they are to me, to my memory of her. I have always, because my father is a carpenter, believed that there is something sacred about the hands, that in them there is the sorrow and sacrifice of a lifetime. When she tattoos for long stretches her hands cramp and I want very desperately to hold them, to rub them, to make them feel soft and human again. But too, secretly, I like them worn, I like the smooth hard spots where her tools have flattened and hardened the flesh.  I feel at home when she presses them against me, warm and worn after a day of work. The very power of her creation still charged in the joints and creases of her fingers.

I never told her, not when she was with me anyhow, how much I loved her hands. I would, some days, when we were lying in bed, press them to my chest and trace her bones. Maybe I knew then that she would go off to another place and leave me. But now I sit, looking at a photograph of her playing with a camera. I see her fingers searching it out, crawling over every inch, like they did when we said goodbye for the last time.  She traced my cheekbones as if she might be able, just through touch, to remember me like that. I am looking at her hands and I am sixteen-year-old boy again, learning what it means to love, learning how the body, which is built so much like a machine, feels pain in ways that can only be explained as phantom. That is, this longing I feel, it is not the sharp sting of tearing flesh or the quick snap of broken bone, it is a slow ripple starting at the center and moving outward with no end in sight.

 

Jon Chopan received his MFA in Creative Nonfiction writing from The Ohio State University and he currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. He is the Midwest Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit him at: www.pulledfromtheriver.com