Hands

It was my hands. Those fleshy tools attached to the house that was my fresh and unfamiliar body; the haunted corpse. I could feel that writhing animus at the tender age of three. I could perceive with my mind when her eyes raked her raised hands that she was and that I was alive.

At the time it was not like enlightenment, or in any manner akin to the transcendence of the physical spaces. I was horrified having become simultaneously aware of my immortality and my current crude, limited and beastly status. Night was the most harrowing of experiences, being alone and aware that I am cut apart from myself. I found peace in the daylight where I could meet other eyes and little hands and where I could trust larger hands to provide dissolution of the perceived separation between myself and myself.

But trust, I quickly learned, must bend in accordance with the measure of strength and integrity housed within other animated bodies. To place yourself in the hands of others requires more than faith that they will consider your well-being as significant as their own. This knowledge gave way to flaring nostrils in my hunt for integrity. If I didn’t smell its scent in waves as readily as other animals find blood in the air, you did not receive my trust. It was an act of self-preservation and a need to save my mind and to explore the height and depravity of my corporeity at a later date. I would hide it within myself until I found someone to find me out and help me temper that visceral drive.

In dreams, though, I did begin to explore. I scapegoated the church. The separation of church and my state allowed me the ability to experience hell without realizing I was experiencing myself. I was five-years-old.