The dance was over.   The evening outside was clear and cool, a soft summer breeze breathing over us as we walked from the building. 

I reached out to hold your hand.  It was stiff, startled like a deer caught in the lights and almost readily to flee.  Yet slowly, hesitantly, almost in stages, I could feel your hand relaxing into mine.  The fingers like old men in an exercise workshop, bending jerkily, the joints cracking and straining.

This is something they have not done for a while, but soon the fingers insert themselves between mine and accept my own fattened digits as their natural pillows which then enfold them, caress them and shield them from all harm.

Our palms are dry like the talc-covered palms of gymnasts and at first, I feel the tension in yours as it prepares to meet mine almost like an adversary, but accedes and softens kissing my palm with its skin, like lips.

We are talking about the evening but our hands and arms seem to be functioning within their own universe, communicating in their own language of rythmic touch and muscular twitch.

In a moment we are gently swinging our hands together and the happiness of our hands spreads up through our arms so that I see you smile at me.  I would die to see that smile and here it appears as if by magic like a gift from some mysterious elsewhere, yet rooted down into our hands which gently hold each other in a lover’s embrace.

This is the message I have been searching for from you.  I have been scanning the reaches of your face, your lips and eyes for some signal as if from a distant universe that has travelled through time to reach me and all the time, it was here in your hand and all I had to do was take it and hold it and walk with you on a summer evening with a clear night sky and a breeze gently breathing on our cheeks.

But we reach the car and l have to release your hand which has been our connection, the way you have clearly told me you still love me and I bend down to kiss your hand, to hold it but a moment longer when it is pulled sharply from my grasp and my lips touch empty air.

The shock of loss makes my eyes well up with water and when you ask, I say a dust mote has made me tear and I open your car door and walk around to my side and I feel you slipping away from me, as if we had been swimmers and you had suddenly sunk like leaden weight to the bottom.  And the sensation of your hand in mine is no longer there at the ends of my fingers and in my palm but has traveled into  my brain and it is like a vague pattern, or light that I am trying to remember and hold on to but I am afraid it will fade and how will I hold you in my soul then?  How will I keep you in my heart? 

And when you sat in the car, you turned to me and told me to put on my seat belt and I started the car and turned to look at you and you said, “Well, what are you waiting for?  Let’s go home.”

And I put the car in drive and opened the window and the cool breeze of the evening touched my cheeks and felt like icy refreshment and out of your sight I brushed a rolling drop of water from the corner of my lip.

And we drove home in silence and we got home, you got out of the car and went to the door and I did not hold your hand.