The Grammar of Touch

Your hands hold the world the way a cup holds water— not as possession but as temporary shelter, the edges already dissolving where palm meets air. In the creases of your palm, the fortune-teller reads geography: the river of love, the mountain of fate. But your hands know better. They know they are always becoming something else— flour-dusted, soil-stained, trembling with effort. A child's hand in yours asks a question your thumb cannot quite answer. You hold on. You let go. Again. Again. The hands that built this city are ground to dust, their fingerprints erased from every surface. But the door hinges turn, the stone steps shine, and someone else's hands will trace them, adding their own small damage and grace.