The importance of hands in letting go

I want to trace the lines of your hands

Learning them as I would learn the way to your door

Each finger runs over the creases

Like a child learning to read for the first time

Like my bare feet that summer

Over the cracks in the cement

In the ground outside your window.

Three years ago,

This would have been a love poem.

I would have written my heart into the spaces between the letters

I knew the underside of your tongue.

But now my heart, what is it?

It drifts like the smoke of a faceless stranger

Faceless like the spaces between my fingers

Where none now call home.

And there’s something about home that gets me

Every time I walk through a door

And feel on the handle the soul of every person

Who has ever left for the last time

And the heartbeats of those who came back.

It’s funny how the seasons change as the earth

Warms its feet, then its hands with the warmth of the sun.

I found a bird with a broken wing

You said that they were pests, that it deserved what it got

But I couldn’t help thinking that I didn’t want to see it hurt

So I left you.

Now my cat sleeps next to me in the evenings

On the couch, he moves closer to me when he needs to

I can’t make him love me

Any more than I can make the stars change flight.

But I still need him.

There was once something I felt I needed to tell you.

Something about the wooden floors and their scars.

Is the pain of the trees any less real?

I don’t want to know about the scars,

Like the stars in the sky

There are just some things I’ll never understand.

And there are the things you tried to hold before they bit through you

Like my teeth, if they were strong enough, they could have

But you took my chin

You always held things with two hands.

They were the most familiar part of your body,

The part I could hold instead your heart.

Now I don’t need to.

Your hands were enough.

Enough to break me apart with the cracks outside your door

And as pieces, I fell through them to the centre of myself

And got up without you.

This morning I’ll hear the bird I saved without you

Each morning it comes to my window

I feed it with some wet bread and sugar

And it looks into my eyes before flying away with a piece of my heart.

You see, I give out parts of my heart like slices of bread

And they keep telling me that one day I’ll run out

But I just can’t stand to see them hurt.

I’m okay.

Each Sunday I roll up the letters my heart has made

I bake them into the bread that I’ll give to the bird I once saved

And I’ll jump the cracks in the pavement.

I’ll wait for my cat to come home before I start dinner

And I’ll hold onto doorhandles

Looking for the soul you left behind.