A repository of hands that I love for various reasons-

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 color 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 yet touched, but imagine the sound 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 one day when I am falling and nothing feels in 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.

...real intimacy comes from the knowing of things that are only to be discovered through the sharing of mundanity, insights that are only to be glimpsed over the sharing of breakfast — seeing the shape of a person by how they peel an orange, how much butter they put on their bread. do you prepare your coffee with a french-press? drip? percolator or perhaps a moka? pass me the honey as you tell me about the thing you heard on the radio and the not-so-funny joke your professor made about kierkegaard. what you had for lunch yesterday and what you saw on your commute. let me pretend i can reveal you to me by the study of these habits: the small magic of the mundane, the beauty of the overlooked.

if it is one thing i am convinced of it is this: that a person can be revealed in these seemingly tiny and insignificant occurrences. seen through — witnessed — in the thread-bare ordinalities of life.

∆ Excerpt from Eve Lion's, "On the Intimacy of the Mundane"