1. Your hand on the train window, fingers splayed against the glass like a bird who should’ve known better. Five fingers. Five points on a star.
There are no stars in this city.
The train starts moving and behind the window your hand is moving with it and behind your hand, you and behind you, my ghost. I run along with the train like they do in the movies but just like in the movies, it is not enough – the train is a bullet and I am the rifle, left behind.
2. Your hands in my hair, your freckles in my mouth, your body and my body your body my body yours I am yours I am yours –
For the long haul, I say afterwards, laid bare and clean with daylight. Yes, you reply.
Your skin: a web I never want to untangle from.
3. Your hand on my shoulder in the dim morning light. You have to get up, you whisper. I’m awake, but my eyes are still shut, swollen from crying myself empty the night before. Summer is burning through angry his year. It is so hard not to get caught in the wreckage.
I can’t, I whimper. You have to. I have grown so heavy, these past few months. The weight of me is starting to tug at your chest. Still, you lift me from the bed. Still, you carry me.
4. Your hands touch the ocean for the first time. You look so beautiful, with salt on your eyelashes and the sun on your shoulders, that the waves rise to meet you, to be closer to you. Water, you say, in the voice of a child, your sea-blue eyes wide in wonderment. We laugh. The gulls laugh with us.
5.Your hands on my waist, unsteady. I don’t know how to dance. Neither do I, but here in your living room, on a Tuesday night, with that song on the radio, it doesn’t matter. Just follow me.
And we twirl across the carpet, bumping into the furniture and stepping on each other’s feet all the while. My chin finds home in your shoulder. The moon, hanging in the sky above your roof, starts to leak in through the open window. We spin and splash in the puddles.
6. Your hand on a cell phone. My hand on a cell phone. And a steering wheel.
I just don’t know if I can keep doing this.
All I hear on the other line is the quiet of your breathing, but you might as well be screaming across the dark between us. This winter will be the coldest in a generation, they say, but right now, it feels like the chill is coming from somewhere inside my bones.
Four hours later, my hand on the buzzer of your apartment. You don’t have to ask who it is. I’m sorry flies reeling from my blue throat to the warmth of your lips. Somehow, we know we will make it through to the spring.
7. Your hands on a bottle, pouring sparkling cider into dollar store wine glasses. It’s a miracle these haven’t shattered yet, you say. A miracle: I am here on your couch and I do not feel broken. A miracle: I am six months sober. A miracle: you remembered.
8. Your hand rests on the space of my ribs where, underneath, something is beating itself soft. My voice cracks like pavement under ice. That’s my heart. I am foolish and desperate and afraid that the only ending I’ve ever known is the only ending there is. This bloody fist in my chest has never stopped bracing for impact.
9. Your hands under my shirt, your hands closer than they have ever been before. We are both strangers to this kind of wanting, but you – the scar on your chin, your teeth when you laugh, the way your glasses smudge against my cheek – are not a stranger. You never have been. This moment, breathless. There is nothing on the other side of this moment.
This moment, we are holy.
10. Your hands reach up to the night and trace the stars for me. Cassiopeia. Cygnus. Sirius. Orion. I am wrapped in your jacket, wrapped in this feeling, wrapped in the headlights and the autumn air and the bright blinding newness of it all. Still, sometimes I feel as though I must have burned out long ago, before you even knew my name, and you are only seeing the light of me, travelling silently through the space between us. I wish we could go where your hands are pointing, far away from this earth and all the gravity that comes with it, far away from everyone who says this can’t last. But for now, we are alive. For now, it is enough just to be with you, alone in the darkness. For now, it is enough just to be held.
11. Your hand fumbles for mine in the twilight. We are standing by our cars. We are always standing by our cars, even when the cicadas stop singing, even when it rains. We stand by our cars because going inside them means driving away. We stand by our cars because driving away means we are no longer next to each other.
We cannot hear thunder, but I can feel the electricity in your fingertips all the same.
12. My hand touches yours and you don’t pull away.
In the end, this is all that matters.
(If I am the rifle, then yours are the hands that hold me.)
