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Creative Writings

Most people live with two feet firmly planted. They spread roots, grounded through their worn down soles, which flatten more with each use until the heels and arches of their feet relax in straight lines parallel to the floor beneath them. Despite my efforts to buy supportive running sneakers, the arcs of my feet have waxed towards the inevitability of filling the empty space beneath them, but I am not rooted in them. I’ve never been good at laying down roots; instead, I’m grounded in my hands. 
 

My hands connect me to my family, not just through the way my mother’s manicured fingers match the length of my own, or the way that my clumsily rounded fingernails mirror the shape of my father’s, but through the language that we speak. My mother challenged the world with every “My Fair Lady” song she burst out singing, even though she could not hear the tune. My father’s defiance was through handwritten messages passed back and forth on bank notepads, asking to withdraw the money he worked hard to earn.
 

My own ears, half-full of hearing, shaped me, as my hands shaped my world. As a child, my grip was not yet large enough to contend with my three older brothers in contests of strength, but my five-year-old spirit was always convinced that they would be. The toughness inherited from my brothers curled my grown fingers around my new house keys years later, when we moved to an unfamiliar town. On my first day of school, I stretched my palm forward and shook hands with the first person I met. My hands embraced unfamiliarity again years later —this time silver with a hockey keychain. Then once more six months after that, and I’ve held those keys since. 

My hands are a calling card that I could always harken back to in times of shaken identity. College was the first time my hands went dry of American Sign Language. But, even stripped of vocabulary, my fingers never held still. My pointer finger twitched into an “X”-letter curve over my Canon DSLR shutter button at protests where the sideways rain froze every bone except the metacarpal ones. Each fully formed ASL “X” earned me another photo of minimum wage workers raging in the night.

My hands grabbed every opportunity possible in my semester abroad. They firmly wrapped around iron bars jutting downward in the hole at the top of the Blarney Castle while I kissed the Blarney Stone. They never shook once when I held the microphone at a Czech feminist poetry slam event I later wrote about. If I’m not grabbing something real, I get restless, looking for the next bit of life that I can capture. 
 

Usually my hands are full, and flying. After shooting off a text, the phone gets replaced with a simple black BiC pen and notebook of half-scribbled ideas that are never safe from testing, weathered bike handlebars careening towards opportunity, empty stretched out canvases begging for paint, a timer reminding me to race towards a mile below 7 minutes and 30 seconds, a book carefully pushed open to reveal stories of adventurers, or another, bigger hand interweaved with my own, squeezing mine tighter when I smile.
 

Teachers say my mind is like a sponge, and my coach told me my legs run on solar powered batteries. When asked if I’m a night or morning person, I always reply, “I’m a day person.” I am a powerhouse of energy, and my hands are the cogs that turn the wheel. 
 

It’s my hands that pulled me up Mount Mansfield in Vermont and the Boulder Flatirons of Colorado when the rocks rose too steep for step. My hands have pushed me up every time I’ve fallen, the pebbles of asphalt digging into my palms when I tripped in my track lane, or the plastic desk cold against my skin when I rose from a test I felt I did poorly on. No matter what, my hands are a flurry of action, keeping me in motion.
 

I’ve never been good at laying down roots; I’ve always been better at charging forward.