Hands of lifetimes
holding hands kara braithwaite
Breaking through any veneer takes time. Prodding and poking, gentle rounds of pounding and soon enough, a fine fracture appears. Time and patience, compassion to allow sees the shellac of mask crack and eventually shatter.
And yet, it’s not always so, not when years of layering in plutonium and gold, wedged in between toughened steel and encrusted in diamond particles for added strength, teeters in brittle balance to become a complexity seemingly inconceivable to penetrate.
Trying mustn't stop, pushing with the gentlest of might to pry into the tiniest of miniscule fractures that clam shut to protect its pearl. The harder the push, the tighter the molecules bind. These walls of lifetimes unite as secret societies with the most stringent passwords and handshakes of multiple dexterity. Breaking through takes time and is more laborious than sharpened chisels rasping day and night at the rock of hardened lava and the spiked-up engraver etching in more profoundly with each scratch. A labour of love that can take forever. Or never.
Digging too deep though can strike a fissure that turns suddenly south. The cleft snaps to a chasmic abyss, where erratic fireworks clash with shooting debris, all while caving in on itself.
Inside and out collide and draw into a coiling twist, a vortex sucking up every me, me, me. I'm here, he's there, the divide is great ... I can't but you can, she has more and I have none. He cares, she cares most definitely … you know, they all know the truth.
Until there's a discrete tickle that comes from these walls of lifetimes, prompting an instinctual recognition. Yet it retreats as quickly as it appears. Or does it?
The shifting between one and the other, and then both, the betrayal in a pool of liquid whispers. Leaded boots hook into a mirrored room kissed by Judas, reflecting as a brilliant cut diamond. Any glimpse of sight is too stark, any grasp is of liquid mercury.
The tickle takes a form, a shadow in those walls of lifetimes. The energy is undeniable, as the breath of life passed to Adam by the lightest of touch in Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Those boots begin to unhinge from their crimped claws.
Churned pitting begins to ease and the idea that some things must be, falls as a veil of solace. A hand of being takes mine, grounding in more might than any wall of lifetimes, even against the wet fallen from a blanket of darkest grey where the sky and road ahead merge as one mantle of colourless drab.
Hands weave to help wash away caustic tears. They build an intangible strength impervious to the demands of everything. Unusual in structure and more intricate than a brain brimming in full seismic thought dancing with a heart flushed in erogenous fervour.
Look closely. The hand is there, tucked into the rock façade hiding a thousand stories. They're there, laced in tenderness and sprinkled in kindness and with a depth that can reach any heart’s core. Those hands come from near and far, at any most unexpected time, and can illuminate as pure gold from those walls of lifetimes.
It’s the only way to warmth yet unknown, to feel the lightness of hands of lifetimes.