As with most days, morning shook him from his sleep with hands of hurt and worry. He woke suddenly, jostled by the throbbing ache in his right shoulder. His dreams, still fresh on his eyes, were shapeless and without words; only half remembered by the sensation of a presence that had been painting the walls of his subconscious with feverish colors that disquieted him from the comfort of drab solitude. The paint was wet, and clung to his feet as he walked into waking. In the futility of trying not to think of the painter, he thought of the painter.
His shoulder creaked as he stretched out the contorted, blood starved limb. The aches informed him that his sleep had been unwavering in its restlessness. He tried to focus on the discomfort’s instruction, to distract his mind from these such persistent pursuers, until both ache and dream grew dull and defeated at his somnolent stubbornness. He would often wake with a start from his limbs jolting out from under him; as if reaching out quickly for something that wasn’t there that should have been. Lingering vestiges, perhaps, of a past life–or something that had spilled over from another world entirely.
As his heavy eyes adjusted to the light lazily spilling into the bedroom, he noticed the rain had finally quelled, but a lazy gloom still lingered over his quiet town. The still glistening streets made him hopeful that they had not seen the last of this winter’s storms. The December showers had brought with its nourishing showers, new aches that had begun to bite at him with such strength in their jaws, that he could not simply will them away. As he studied their petulant teeth, his well-oiled apathy when dealing with such matters he forced himself to believe were inconsequential, shifted suddenly from feigned indifference to intrusive worry. Worries he had not carried before, that arrived suddenly among the new burdens that, as a man, he had only just adjusted to by lifting them willingly and ignoring that ever waning voice of angst. You carry it all on your shoulders, he thought, and continued to massage the tightness out of his muscles.
Vigilant as he was to surveying the constant condition of his body, he had begun to notice his right hand seemed to swell along the metacarpal bone from a boxer’s break that he’d earned in during a time where angst waxed full like a blood moon. When anger was still his master and he, a naive apprentice who like most boys was taught anger was his only acceptable means of emotional expression. Like a painter told to paint the sky, and only given the color red. The fifth bone in his hand had never healed correctly; the small crater in his knuckle served as a monument to the consequences of the brash, stupid, and often unnecessary violence of men–or rather, boys playing at being men. The calcification of the broken bone had made the fist stronger, yet because the break was not correctly set, as the cartilage healed over time the blunt trauma still resulted in a malformation of his hand. It cramped to the verge of temporary paralysis when he wrote for too long, and when it rained, he felt a swelling ache, as if his hand were suddenly made of wood gone damp. For the wound to heal correctly, he would need to break the bone again, but why go back to what authored the pain in the first place when he was already grown so used to how it ached?
He remembered reading once that the body responds in all manner of ways to changes in air pressure that occur before the advent of a storm, and some of these responses can be the swelling of soft tissue and fluids expanding around bodily injuries. He was no stranger to the sensitivity humans experience surrounding storms; understanding, from an anthropological perspective, that our senses evolved to seek out the rain in pursuit of fertile pastures. His father would often sniff the air like a bloodhound and be able to predict if it would rain; even when the weather seemed to call for clear skies. Human olfactory senses are more sensitive to the perfumed microbes of rain than sharks are of blood in the water; and his own nose was now just as keen. He swore he could feel, among the aches and the scents, that on those wet, winter days, how the green of the world seemed to open up around him to receive the rain, like parted and expecting lips waiting on the dare of a first kiss. Where others cursed those rainy days, even as a child he would delight. Chasing even storms for the hope of catching a glimpse of lightning and feeling thunder break above him, echoing in his rib cage like waves against a cliff. Rain was as familiar as mother’s lullaby, a song sung by bloodline, an ode to the perpetually rain kissed highlands of his forebears. Painted eternally green and long since unbesmirched by the foot fall of men. When it rained, he was home.
The patio was still wet from the storm the night before. The skies were clearing but his hand still ached. He found himself staring at his hands, studying the road map of vascular highways that ran down to the coast of his knuckles that he tensed and released, testing their strength as if suddenly it would be sapped from him at any moment. Turning his hands over, he gazed at the lines of his palms, and the calloused clouds that lingered over them from years of blistered labor that had purchased his strength. He thought of palm readers and words like, ‘heart lines’ and ‘chakra’. The ancient cartography of reading hands, and the weight of its credibility among a cold, modernizing and quite mechanical world that seemed dead set on removing the heart from any and all conversation.
As he continued to study his fingers, a slow marching fear set sight on him and he fell in rank; what if he lost the strength of his hands completely? Would he soon be unable to pluck the strings of a guitar, play the keys of a piano, take a pen to paper on matters of the heart, or take the hands of a lover and intertwine them in his fingers? He sat with that fear for a moment, as he had learned that “the only way out is through”. Wondering where the foundation of that feeling came from, he invited the discomfort to have its due discourse, and after slowly digesting in its belly, he found himself full of tremendous gratitude that he possessed the ability to do these things with his hands at all. With hesitant but earnest ego he saw his hands were the hands of an artist…so much like the hands of his grandmother.
As he pondered on painters, palms, and pain, his abrupt thought of his grandmother as he sat with this fear–was by fear’s own design. There, at the root of his worry, was the recollection that his grandmother was an artist who had lost the use of her hands after being stricken with arthritis. She was already great in her years when he was born, so he’d only known her for a short while as a child; but what an impression she left after only so little time. He still vividly remembered her kindness, her smell, her gifts of lemon drops and her love of reading. How her frail hands, decorated with their hard earned decades, shook and gnarled into themselves, so stricken as they were with arthritic tremors. He recalled sitting on her blanketed lap as a young boy, holding him at her side, how she turned the pages of his books not with the pinch of fingers, but with her entire clasped hand, slowly, shakily, but steadfast still with the stoicism of a woman who stood apart.
Being so young, he was not yet taught to see someone challenged so physically as a cripple; he only knew, in that way only a child could know, that that was simply her way. Now, as a man, vividly sitting at the hearth of those warmest of memories, he imagined the tremendous effort it must have taken her as she battled her disease to do something as simple as turning a page in her grandchild’s picture book. How often she read to him on that rocking chair by the window, so constricted as she was by condition, but still, holding him tighter then the disease held her. As the long forgotten memories fell onto him like the rain that pattered on the roof, he began to truly grasp, perhaps for the first time, the enormous and unyielding depth of a woman’s heart, and wept as he fell in.
Forgetting the way she showed her love all this time felt like a sin, but he forgave himself–for she came back to him when he needed her. His grandmother, along with being an outstanding woman of character, was also an artist of extraordinary talent. Her prowess unknown to the world, hidden away in domestic servitude like so many women of her time. These great writers, painters, and poets–entire voices of a generation whose art lies lost to time in an attic somewhere gathering dust instead of adoration. And the singers–oh, he imagined all the singers whose beautiful songs were only heard by their children and their dirty dinner plates. How many homes held a concert in its halls played for an audience of none? His grandmother’s paintings belonged in galleries and museums, her piano and harp should have been recorded and transmuted on vinyl; something to last–not for the sake of worldly acclaim, but for legacy that is passed down in family. But it was lost, all of it, except a few dusty treasures, when he lost her. Forever hidden in the same way, he confessed, he had been hiding himself.
What inhabited him now wasn’t worry, or the pitiful distraction from his dreams or waking life; all at once it was love, and the absence of where to put that enduring love that we call grief. The deepest, and truest ache, that made the pain in his bones feel so utterly inconsequential, of only wanting more time. He stayed with it, letting the lesson pour into him, for he was as open now as the flowers in his garden receiving the rain. Knowing fully then there was only so much time to make, and hold the things he made with these hands. So much time had already been lost, held in the familiar fingers of his fear. But if his grandmother could still hold him with hands riddled with disease, then he had no right, no excuse, not to hold onto the things he did not want to lose.
He decided he would make something today. Anything would be enough. As he set about his work, he remembered something his father had told him about his grandmother once, “I always saw my mother when I looked at you…you have her spirit.” He held onto his father’s words, and his grandmother’s memory, and suddenly remembered his hand as he realized, it doesn’t hurt anymore. The weight in his shoulders felt so, so much lighter. He breathed, and though his face was damp, he didn’t smell any rain.
– IG
My Grandmother at Berkeley University, pursuing her degree in the arts.