Memoirs of an Amnesiac

/Photo courtesy of Google.com

My first attempt at drawing hands came with a rather shady impression. At that time I thought if I'd get to even form decent-looking hands, I'd be able to impress that high school crush who liked looking at paintings of hands. After mustering the courage to show him what appeared to me were Da Vinci's Sistine Chapel rendition of the creation, like a child who can't wait to show her mother what her more rambunctious-than-creative hands had created, I was beaming with my freckled face as I handed my object of affection--my crude drawing. What he said when he received my drawing totally unnerved me. "Who drew this? These looked like swollen bananas!" Ouch. I never really got to admit that the hooligan beyond the crime was I. But my fascination and attraction towards hands remained unscathed even to this day.

I love looking at hands in whatever form and state they may be, whether they have grown decrepit over manual and hard labor, whether they are as soft and untarnished as a baby's skin, whether they have been carefully embellished by those conspicuous veins (that most medical technicians spend a lot of time locating), whether they are long and candle-like, short and stumpy, bony or meaty, hands just never seize to amaze me!

Many times, I even find myself shooting furtive glances at men's hands inside the jeepneys as when they hold on to those metal (and rusty) bars, holding on for dear life as another reckless driver makes his way along the now-congested streets and blind alleys of metropolitan Cebu. It is probably my sheer disgust at not being able to really draw them perfectly that makes me forever enamored by this anatomical piece.

Once I caught sight of two kindergartners in my school as they held hands when they crossed a street inside our school campus. The sight has evoked in me a kind of ineffable feeling, something that I'll never get to put into words, even when I try to (just like those swollen bananas). I am simply amazed at how such kids in such a young age intuitively understand the concept of connecting.

No other part of the body could connection be more personified than our own hands. When hands connect, a rare form of connection happens. Worlds that are somehow apart, become a welcome composition to another's world. When hands connect, a worthy cause is given birth. When hands connect, faith in the known and the unknown begins. When hands connect, life begins and more often that not, ends.

Someone once told me that the spaces between our fingers are meant to be so that someone else's hands could perfectly fit into those. I dare say that fingers need not be clasped for real connection to begin.

It is in the connection made in the heart that dictates hands in whatever form and state they may be, to connect even in the most ephemeral of moments, just to show love, respect, tenderness, and compassion.

Something that someone like me may always try to replicate but unsuccessfully achieves.