Yours are fingers that pluck guitar strings and tumble over piano keys, that grab my hair in fistfuls, gentle but urgent, and draw heat to the surface of my skin. These are fingers that could someday weave double-knots into the shoelaces of our future children’s shoes and smooth bandaids over their broken skin. These fingers cracked me open when I’d tried to seal my edges shut; they’d squeezed my cold hands and held on tight. Together, our palms had pulsed messages back and forth, silent proclamations, and back then a voiceless love had seemed like enough.
Then the priest had bound our wrists with ribbon, an ancient Irish ritual that I’d found romantic until I looked down at our tethered selves, an angry knot between us.
Later, I kneel in the same church that tied us to each other and press my palms together, my fingertips directing questions to the sky. The priest volleys our questions back to us, and I turn them over in my hands as if maybe the answers are etched into my skin. He tells us that God would not create a rock so heavy He couldn’t carry it, and I try to hold onto this idea, but it slips through my threaded fingers and I leave with my hands empty at my sides.
Now, we still pass messages back and forth, but our hands speak different languages. I say We’ll get through this, but it translates to Something is broken between us. I say I love you, but our hands are barely touching and the words are conjugated wrong: I loved you. I ask Do you still love me? but my palms are slick with sweat and the words slide away, never delivered at all. So instead I ask Have we created something so heavy we can no longer carry it?
And then we let go, fingers untwining, or maybe it’s lives untwining, a ribbon unspooling until all that’s left is the phantom press of something that’s already gone.
