Your hands, most of all

This is a true story. I was sitting in a park once, shoes and socks off, grass beneath my bare feet, sky scrolling above me like it was rewinding to the good bit. I was enjoying a lovely moment of watching people doing the various things people tend to do in parks… and I felt something beneath my thumb in the grass. 

Now, if the next moment had been in a movie, it would have been a crash-zoom. An extreme and sudden closeup in the middle of a drifty, gauzy, peaceful scene: right in close on the moment of truth in an urban park. What did I just put my hand in? It felt like - and forgive me for bringing these words to our happy little world of parks and grass and clouds -  moist paper. 

It was, upon further inspection, moist paper. Ew! But then I realised something. I realised there was handwriting on the moist paper which was probably wet from lying in the dewy grass. See? Edging back into romantic again isn’t it? The paper was very small. There were some letters spidering out and so I unfolded it, curious. It was about as big as a postage stamp. There was very small handwriting on it, very careful if a little bit spidery, and it said this: 

M 

It is your hands, most of all.

C

No kidding. Not a lie. That’s it. The comma and everything. Now, this being the digital age, and me being under the age of, well anyway so my first thought was to photograph this (now transformed) mysterious dew-covered love letter I found in the park and invite the internet to help me decide what it meant. Maybe we could even find M? Or C? Maybe this love story - for how could it be anything else? - could now become a project of community imagination - an ongoing collaboration of reflections, perhaps, on hands and parks and love and dew.  

But instead: this is a Public Service Announcement. It is your hands, most of all.

It isn’t your face in the mirror.

It isn’t your bank balance. 

It isn’t that embarrassing thing that happened or your excruciating Centrelink phone call or your parking fine. 

It isn’t the worst version of you or the best version of you or how clean your house is or whether you’re wearing tracksuit pants when everybody else is in a  ballgown or a ballgown when everybody else in tracksuit pants. 

It’s not whether you please your boss or your parents or your children or your accountant or even yourself.

It’s your hands, most of all. 

It’s the way you move and someone who loves you can spot you in a crowd from a mile off.

It’s the thumping tail of the animal you’re nice to.

It’s your hands.

It’s what you do when you listen to music and you don’t even know you’re doing it.

It’s the way your eyes move to someone else’s and theirs move to you without a word being spoken and you’re both saying the same thing - ”cup of tea?” or, “is this meeting ever going to end?”

It’s the doodles you do when you’re on the phone or listening to something or waiting.

It’s your hands.

It’s the way your brain feels when you’re tired from your favourite thing.

It’s that thing you do when you’re standing somewhere, talking to someone, and the talk is going on for a while and you’re thinking and so you absent-mindedly do something repetitive and soothing like rake the ground with one foot or pick at tree bark with your fingers and both you and the person you’re talking to watch you do it while you speak and it focuses your talk and it becomes at once less intimate and more intimate and it’s your hands.

The reason I didn’t tweet the lovely note I found in the morning dew is that I lost it. I actually think I washed it in a pocket. I have no proof it exists. I cannot use it to reunite M and C or celebrate their love or lament the lingering note of nostalgic regret. Public Service Announcement: in a world that on very rare occasions gives you dewy love notes when you thought you were getting moist paper, it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. Just be you, with your hands, and the little ways you connect to the world, and if you like, write somebody a note and fold it up nice and small.   

This was originally published in The Big Issue. Buy it from your local vendor.