1.Hands of a new lover, unsure yet wanting.

2. The tarot card reader’s hands, as she held mine in hers and placed them on top of the cards. I swear, for a moment, it felt like I did know the future even before she uttered a word.

3. My mother’s hands, skin stretched and a texture I have only ever seen on her. Not soft, not rough. Just pure skin taut on a frame. Diaphanous.

4. I go to a museum and play with a motion sensor music installation. A man comes and asks me to close my eyes, takes my hands, with a museum-worthy ease, and shows me how the installation works. I stand there dumbfounded, hoping the colour hasn’t reached my cheeks, as this man with the softest hands demonstrates how the farther my hands move away from the camera, the longer the note is held.

5. His hands remind me of a girl who was my best friend for two months in Grade 7. Her laugh and the soap she used to credit the softness of her hands to, the soap I used that entire school year and next. The soap, when I found in a supermarket a decade later, I walked around sniffing the box for fifteen minutes while my friends picked chocolates to make me a cake with.

6. Hands I haven’t touched yet, but imagine the crackle of the knuckles of.

7. Hands I’ll never again touch and can’t for the life of me remember the texture or the shape and size of. Hands I hold the hardest in my dreams, and hope that one day, when I am falling and nothing feels within reach to hold on to, the memory of them holding mine will come and I’ll let go. Of the hope and the want, and fall with grace.