I inherited my mother’s hands, slender and delicate and precise. They lack the layer of callus on my father’s palms. Mine are the size of his, large and meaty and enveloping those around them, but his never really quite fit on mine. So much room around the fingers.

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My hands are cut from cotton fabric, stitched together from stuffed animals my titas bought me when I was little. My hands have only been worn down by handling papers and privates, picking up brushes and bags of film.

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My hands have never touched tuition statements, have never written promissory notes so my son could stay in private school. My hands have swept and mopped classroom floors, but never cleaned them out of necessity for a weekly salary. My hands have never tasted the salt of sitting on rice, have never withstood the lash of a belt across their knuckles. My hands have never drawn mathematics sore on my son’s cheek until he recited them back to me correctly. My hands could never wrap around the shaft of a rifle, could never load bullets into the cylinder of a revolver.

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My hands have never lived through martial law, have never sat still as soldiers strolled by in their jeeps, patrolling for people out after curfew. My hands have never held a machine gun and stood watch in the moonlight. My hands have never held the tongue of a tanque de guerra waiting on one word to let loose into a crowd of my own countrymen. My hands have never welcomed an infant where it once cradled infantry. My hands are so thin. So thin.

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His layer of callus is a thick one.

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Callus. Laid thick on my thumb when I moved against metal. Layered like a pile of dead bodies on my fingers. Human shield against the steel. I have never been so fascinated with watching skin rip off a palm than when I was a fencer, when I removed my metal gloves after a bout. Swaths of white seas. Blister. Too much friction under the mesh, not enough tension. The skin tore the way mozzarella tears, wet with sweat. I was trying to learn what it meant, trying to learn who I meant.

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My hands played at war. Holed themselves in armor, in trenches between the titanium. Held a blade as if they could lose their lives with each lunge. Granted, there were days when I swung the steel at my own neck. Because the act of layering pie-crust calluses onto skin made me feel like I was baking, not breaking. Mimicking someone else’s truth, not living mine.

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What was mine? I feel like I’ve only ever borrowed from time, reciting the names of men and women better than me. Living to imitate. Mimicry of greatness. Of Twain, of Kaur, of Neruda. Of Hernandez and Valentine. Living to pull bodies out of pens, speaking the smothered language of the dead. And there I go again, using a dead man’s [words] without his permission.

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Who am I underneath this mound of dead bodies? Who am I underneath?

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I wonder.

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I wonder if the porcelain felt the way Beethoven moved in my fingers. The way the night sky rolled over my octave-wide palms. Moonlight. Pool of moonlight. That’s how the keys were. Did they feel that, I wonder? And with each chord, I dipped my hands in the moonlight. Bathing in star-sunken clouds. Did they feel the way stars dripped from my fingers whenever I reached a rest? Slipped off when I stopped?

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I wonder if my best friend, Gini, felt the way I did. Felt for the sonata the way my fingers did. With the short, petite digits of her left hand unable to spread across the octave. Unable to span the breadth of stars. That was the reason she gave up on the piece.

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But when she was learning it, she played the sonata with opposite hands, crossing her arms across the keys. Running over ivories and ebonies in inverted axes. Taken aback, I gazed at how she played, her method more mesmerizing than the melody we both knew. Entranced by how she solved her dilemma. She broke form. Fractured structure. She did it because she had to. Because it was the only way she could.

 

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I grew up with fracture. Broke away from tradition before I was even born. With a breadwinner mom and a domestic cop of a dad, who sent me to a school where boys used one another to fill in the gaps between their fingers, to make up for the lack of girls. Boys’ High, they called it, and I was high on boys from the age of five, sitting in Ms. Ortega’s class across from Clint; the very first one. First boy, at least. The first one whose face made my skin tingle beneath my school uniform. So was it such a surprise that I, Catholic school boy born in the only Catholic country in Asia, fell decades later for a Jew jock plucked at birth from the heart of Arkansas?

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We were both fractured. Like the stretch-marks-on-my-stomach-kind of fractured. I crossed my arms over them so he couldn’t touch them.

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But when he pulled my arms off to kiss my belly, it was like meeting myself for the first time. As if he were introducing me to myself. So I wanted to know every inch of him with my fingertips. He made me feel more welcome in my skin than I ever could. He saw that I existed beyond those marks. Made me realize that I was underneath.

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As I type this, the keyboard cups my fingertips the same as my lover’s hands. Wide and enveloping. My fingers hover; they hesitate. The stop-and-go of a learner’s permit on the gas pedal. But when I’m ready, the keyboard welcomes the words I smash into its surface, keystroke after keystroke. Iteration of game. We are both at play. Unaware that we are engaging in Creation. Fashioning bones onto skin without even realizing it. Our interplay generates. Our union births. Characters, places, stories. I feel a home beneath the keys, and pull it up with each word made. When I finish, the keyboard cradles the newborn, cooing at the monitor.

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Maybe my hands were made to be thin so that it could feel the very fabric of what it was meant to create. Maybe I never needed the callus. Or maybe it was already there. Like I was. Beneath the skin.