What did you expect? What did you imagine when you held my hand? What future were you holding onto when I was your child, or your first boyfriend, of your last husband, or I was your nurse? This is digital science, a seance for the touch that has faded, or been forgotten. Do you remember the way fingerprints tint cold glass and then evaporate leaving behind the clear figments of our false imagination, the oiled paisley designs?
Blow your soul against the pane and the stain will rematerialize,
return,
reform,
refade.
All I am saying is that your fat, sausage thumbs, (or my bony, arthritic fingers) are but numbers and that this faceted appendage evolved by dumb accident to pave the wild intelligence of our species with the genius of counting. This is fact. This is history, and some millenia later the progression from metaphor to math would manage to split the atom, destroy the ozone and put men on the moon.
Two pinkies and a hand, now they stand in church, and now they land on the keyboard, and--if you think about it--cat's cradle is alot like holding hands.
This is the one gesture that is immune to the ruinous sexualization of most physical communication. Hands linked with hands, the very edge of each being, the end of two ropes, the beginning of "reach", that bridge that teaches us everything about the alienation of body from body and the tenuous connection between the two.
