![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanate"What I'll give you since you asked
Is all my time together..."
I sit here, trying or pretending I write. Sometimes I do. But I also spend a great deal of time where my thougths float free of the story I'm trying to bind them up in, thinking about people and places not here, about things I should do but am not, or things I cannot do anything about but wish perhaps I could. And I spend some measure of time looking at my hands, pale and cold here in this space (the room is cold as well, despite all the lights I have turned on, despite being warmer than anywhere else in the house but downstairs in front of the fire, where there is no desk at which to type) crossed, palms towards me, right cradled in left. My open, empty hands. I would like to fill them up with things that one cannot hold-- with love, with joy, with hope to pour out into everyone's lives, and perhaps receive splashing back into my own. Instead I have only a few calouses, faint and strange, marking each joint across the insides of my fingers from clinging to climbing holds and forcing myself upwards. The slight bump on the side of the right index finger, faded because in these days of typing and not taking notes I do not so often hold a pen. The stiffness I once had on the tips of my left-hand fingers is virtually imperceptible now, when I cannot even remember when was the last time I got out violin or guitar to play, and my fingernails, cut short for the climbing, are still nearly too long to set the fingertips flat upon the strings. The fingers themself still bear the subtle traces of my childhood use of them; on the right hand the first finger is just perceptibly longer, a quarter inch perhaps. On the left, the ring finger is just as much subtly lengthened from stretching out along the fingerboard, moving in whole steps away from the other fingers, shifting the angle of the hand to give the pinkey a little more length as well. I was ten when I started to play the violin, and seventeen when I stopped doing so regularly, slightly more than a decade ago. But the shape of my hands and the shape of my mind still remember; it is the only instrument I can sight-read for.
Fingernails trimmed, never quite neat and even, but clean, without corners, proudly made as much the same as my rather haphazard care will likely ever manage; if you press gently on the nail, you can see a little red line beyond which the quick has grown back; for the first sixteen years of my life my nails were shorter than this, constantly bitten or chewed back unevenly. And while my nails will always be too soft to keep long, though they have recovered a great deal, I can at least keep them even now, with some pretense at elegance. Though two fingers (both on the left hand) just now show little marks from getting smashed up fencing; a tiny white mark, almost grown out now, at the center of the ring finger, from Alain's quillion at Pennsic, and a few purple streaks at the side of the thumbnail from where I mauled myself on my own sword fighting Flethry on thursday. A few faint and nearly faded bruises barely imaginable across the backs of the hands. As I type, I cannot see the palms, the insides of my wrists, the paler skin that reminds me how tanned I am become; you, the observer, may not see this; even now my skin is paler than most people's will ever be, but I work in the sun and my face and hands are turned dark by it, and etched with faint lines that no longer go away sometimes. I look at my hands and I see them as Kade's hands, blunt-fingered and competent, marked by weather and use, but no fine lady's pride to display perfectly, proudly, model-like. I am used to them now, until I watch someone with the long pale narrow musician's fingers I have always wanted to have, and then for a moment I will feel odd and displaced again, my own fingers looking short and out of proportion.
They are competent hands, sufficient unto my need, capable of typing as fast as I can think, of catching the mistakes they make and going back to fix them before my conscious mind catches up; they can write, draw sometimes well enough, wield a sword or a trowel, create cloth with sticks and string, braid hair, fold stars from strips of paper. There are other things I wish to teach them-- the left one cannot form letters with ease, they cannot juggle or keep up with harp strings or piano keys-- but it will do. I feel more empty because I cannot hold in the curve of my palms all the joy in the world, to give away again, freeing it to go spinning away in the wind like the seeds of a dandylion until it touches the lives of all the people that I love.
But really, it is Sinbad and Ceridwen with her chickens and her jar of souls, and Minnow, and the boggarts, and eventually Roland, who really deserve my attention now. For all that they are fictional. It is time for more tea, I believe.
Is all my time together..."
I sit here, trying or pretending I write. Sometimes I do. But I also spend a great deal of time where my thougths float free of the story I'm trying to bind them up in, thinking about people and places not here, about things I should do but am not, or things I cannot do anything about but wish perhaps I could. And I spend some measure of time looking at my hands, pale and cold here in this space (the room is cold as well, despite all the lights I have turned on, despite being warmer than anywhere else in the house but downstairs in front of the fire, where there is no desk at which to type) crossed, palms towards me, right cradled in left. My open, empty hands. I would like to fill them up with things that one cannot hold-- with love, with joy, with hope to pour out into everyone's lives, and perhaps receive splashing back into my own. Instead I have only a few calouses, faint and strange, marking each joint across the insides of my fingers from clinging to climbing holds and forcing myself upwards. The slight bump on the side of the right index finger, faded because in these days of typing and not taking notes I do not so often hold a pen. The stiffness I once had on the tips of my left-hand fingers is virtually imperceptible now, when I cannot even remember when was the last time I got out violin or guitar to play, and my fingernails, cut short for the climbing, are still nearly too long to set the fingertips flat upon the strings. The fingers themself still bear the subtle traces of my childhood use of them; on the right hand the first finger is just perceptibly longer, a quarter inch perhaps. On the left, the ring finger is just as much subtly lengthened from stretching out along the fingerboard, moving in whole steps away from the other fingers, shifting the angle of the hand to give the pinkey a little more length as well. I was ten when I started to play the violin, and seventeen when I stopped doing so regularly, slightly more than a decade ago. But the shape of my hands and the shape of my mind still remember; it is the only instrument I can sight-read for.
Fingernails trimmed, never quite neat and even, but clean, without corners, proudly made as much the same as my rather haphazard care will likely ever manage; if you press gently on the nail, you can see a little red line beyond which the quick has grown back; for the first sixteen years of my life my nails were shorter than this, constantly bitten or chewed back unevenly. And while my nails will always be too soft to keep long, though they have recovered a great deal, I can at least keep them even now, with some pretense at elegance. Though two fingers (both on the left hand) just now show little marks from getting smashed up fencing; a tiny white mark, almost grown out now, at the center of the ring finger, from Alain's quillion at Pennsic, and a few purple streaks at the side of the thumbnail from where I mauled myself on my own sword fighting Flethry on thursday. A few faint and nearly faded bruises barely imaginable across the backs of the hands. As I type, I cannot see the palms, the insides of my wrists, the paler skin that reminds me how tanned I am become; you, the observer, may not see this; even now my skin is paler than most people's will ever be, but I work in the sun and my face and hands are turned dark by it, and etched with faint lines that no longer go away sometimes. I look at my hands and I see them as Kade's hands, blunt-fingered and competent, marked by weather and use, but no fine lady's pride to display perfectly, proudly, model-like. I am used to them now, until I watch someone with the long pale narrow musician's fingers I have always wanted to have, and then for a moment I will feel odd and displaced again, my own fingers looking short and out of proportion.
They are competent hands, sufficient unto my need, capable of typing as fast as I can think, of catching the mistakes they make and going back to fix them before my conscious mind catches up; they can write, draw sometimes well enough, wield a sword or a trowel, create cloth with sticks and string, braid hair, fold stars from strips of paper. There are other things I wish to teach them-- the left one cannot form letters with ease, they cannot juggle or keep up with harp strings or piano keys-- but it will do. I feel more empty because I cannot hold in the curve of my palms all the joy in the world, to give away again, freeing it to go spinning away in the wind like the seeds of a dandylion until it touches the lives of all the people that I love.
But really, it is Sinbad and Ceridwen with her chickens and her jar of souls, and Minnow, and the boggarts, and eventually Roland, who really deserve my attention now. For all that they are fictional. It is time for more tea, I believe.