Your hands were made for destruction, thick and leathery, your callouses scratched my skin Your long fingers were dry when they slapped the most sensitive parts of me I bled when they tore into me, I bruised where you pulled the hair on my scalp. For a body so warm, your hands were so cold.
When I remember you, it’s your hands that I see, the cavalry coming Reaching out for me, pulling me against you, you into me, hard. I got hurt.
When I think of you now, I remember your hands, Slamming doors shut, holding mine back, sitting in front of me in out in the audience one year ago. Your knuckles turned white while I read, I was silenced from saying anything about you.
But look at my hands they are creators, making the gentlest of curves of soft charcoal on warm toned paper creating portraits with slight smiles and warm eyes look how they cut and dice winter vegetables with the most inexact precision Preparing meals for people whose hands pull me in with equally gentle and loving fingers
watch how these hands slide along the neck of the guitar, stumbling into chords on strings, turning silence into song My hands can love, in the way yours never could my fingers tucking hair behind her ear, my palms gently cupping the softest parts of her, only after I’ve received an affirmative answer to “can i?” My nails are chewed short and my palms are scarred, they aren’t perfect but they are mine.
There was a moment in which I started thinking of my body as something that does and not something that is done to. This is when you lost, when your phantom grip could no longer hold on, and I was free
I am not under your thumb, I am not afraid anymore I am more human than you treated me and I am more whole than you will ever be.