Emily Costantino, “2002-a confession

2002-a confession

Emily Costantino

We compared the lines in our hands one morning before school. It was colder than the day before, mist rose from the pavement, people closed their windows and we sat on my front steps with our hats on. You opened up your hand, spreading your fingers apart to reveal your palm to me. You were never that great at spelling things out, reading between lines, making sense of what we read in magazines at the supermarket. We learned before the bus pulled up that the lines on my hands were longer. They spread far across my palm, circling around my wrist, making infinite loops, running off my hand, eventually getting away from me. How obnoxious it can be, I thought, to have hands that cry for attention – to win when you aren’t trying. I think soon we’ll all laugh about the nights when it was dark and the light coming from the garage lit up the driveway. I reached for your face in the dark. Extending my hands out through the particles and matter, reading the contours of your face like Braille. Will this light, the one that attracts the bugs and appears only in fractions, show me your face, again? While we hit shovels together like they were swords. Your shovel took a chunk of my finger. It didn’t hurt, but it left a scar. It bled down my hand, dripping off my elbow. We ran inside screaming, leaving our shovels on the pavement. No amount of care, or ointment could heal it. Even after they let you out of the hospital, the scar was there. It was there when you looked at the sun for hours, asking me if it hurt my eyes, as I sat beside you nervously playing with my rings. Was I Judas, or a good friend? For watching it all happen. For only writing letters. I saw the picture. The one you drew when you dipped your hands in red paint and drew long lines down your walls with your fingers. Eventually the lines gave way, meeting the corners of the room, the edges of the walls. And after they put you away, people came to see what you had made. They measured and analyzed, feeling the wet paint with their hands, trying desperately to get inside your head. What could have possessed you, a grade-school boy from the country, they thought? I knew you just didn’t have the time to paint lines that touched. Lines that ran into one another. Lines that created infinite loops. And so the lines on my palms were longer, and so I lived the longest.