Hand Study, New York 2017
I want to remember. The first thing I do to remember is I go to my closet. The notebooks there are waiting, a little waiting line of them, standing on their shortest end. I am searching their dates, I am traveling time. The second-to-last one, the one labeled Aug 2017-Apr 2018, is the one I am searching for. Summer’s end, 2017. The year I turned 33 and fixed the camera on myself.
The details I find inside are disappointing. I do not learn anything I cannot already call back myself. Only that my handwriting was rounder then, there is time in it, I can see the care in it, much more so than today. (My writing now scribbled and sloping, so often hurried, at times nearly unreadable. The rushing and in it I can see, I am astonished to find here in the tilt of a g, one leaning over s — something like a trace, a hint, a suggestion: the shape of my mother’s own hand.)
And anyway, here is what I can remember — only wait. Only now he is crying from the kitchen: Mama! Mama! Mama! The charge of it, the urgency I feel with my whole skin when he calls me this way, and so I fly, I am flying, I land to find him cradling one tiny dimpled elbow. He is in my arms pressing his nose to my chin, his cheek to mine, one and then the other, over and over and over again. He begins to quiet, seems to find comfort in the pressing together of our faces, his cheeks flushed with warm, he has been for days breathing through his mouth, the twice-daily shower steams, the saline spray he refuses even when his favorite bath time bunny-shaped washcloth — the kind I can wear on my hand like a puppet — offers encouragement. And then I am back in my studio, each of the windows in this room have broken, they are letting in the wind, the twilight air, this evening gusting and blowing and blue.
To keep going.
Six years ago in September, the day warm inside our apartment, those rotting wood floors, the places that would sink and bounce up unexpectedly underfoot, soft as grass, as earth sodden and soaked through. It is late afternoon, those early days of menstruation: the building, swelling, swirling nausea. I am distracted, I am late, I am meant to be somewhere else but I am still here — this closet-bedroom turned studio — where I am moving a gift, a potted pair of cactuses (cacti? the internet tells me both words are acceptable). I think maybe (the memory is leaning closer) maybe I am in fact closing a window, the window with the little ledge below it, the ledge (I can see it now) with the cacti.
Mom! Mama! The door blows open.
This particular window requires effort. I can remember with my muscles the effort of moving up or down this window. And so I’m jumping, heaving closed this window and — can it be possible? — I feel nothing of what happens next. Only awe — an odd delight — at the two lines of cactus needles I find suddenly arranged in my skin. I do not remove them; I can only stare and stare and count them instead: eight needles in total, a perfect rectangle, organized into four tidy rows and two tidy columns. I decide they are beautiful. And would you believe I will spend the next hour, maybe longer, trying to photograph my own hand, my own thumb? The pain thumping stronger, until searing, until I am talking to myself, sweating through my shirt, forgetting entirely where I’m meant to be going. I do pull them out eventually, needle by needle. I want to save them somewhere safe, but I don’t.
New York, 2023