Holding Hands – SG Phillips

September 12, 2019

To nervously walk, after a few dates, for what feels like an hour, to wait for her purse to switch arms after she brushes your arm, and then you switch sides while walking because of that purse, only to see her switch that purse to her other arm, and then you bail on the plan of grabbing her hand in its entirety- and she looks at you nervously one block later once she realizes what happened, and then you can’t make the advance to grabbing her hand because you feel like it’s too direct, because you’d have to switch sides again. But eventually you do, both of you, somehow, over all these obstacles and self-situated impediments, grab hands. 

She did, probably, grab your hand, but your hand was there to grab, so you can take some credit.

Both of your palms are damp, it’s gross, but your own personal palms should be dry because you’re trying to be smooth or you’re trying to be smart. The thought that the sweat on your palms might be what conducts both your’s and her’s heartbeats across the lipids across all both of the collective cells in your hands, to the nerves in the palms, across the collective neurons via some gradient of water, salt, and potassium, to raise both of your heart rates in this way that makes both of you this sweaty- that doesn’t even cross your mind, but you were fantasizing about saying things like that earlier. Maybe she thought of it and hoped you wouldn’t say it, or she knew you’d try to say something like that, and knew it from her own experience.

Then the palms get uncomfortable, chafing. You let go, and she lets go, but in such a way that you both know: the other, be it you or them, is welcome to hold it again, indefinitely.