My aging hands

   "Oh you're growing old too", she said pointing at my hands. I looked at my hands, my trusted, sometimes pained hands and wondered what she meant. I noted the net of veins visible under the thin skin and figured they have come closer to it, sometimes they almost bulge under it. 

  "Do you mean my veins? They have always popped but I guess they do so now more than before."

  She has become obsessed with ageing over the last few years, noticing every little change, putting it under the microscope, reading in it the premonition of the gloom ahead. It did not concern me at first, mostly because we have a different approach to any signs of getting older: while I feel the pressure of the youth that's about to end, even the melancholia for it, sometimes I think: look, I grew old enough to get a white hair. The shadow of a wrinkle. I lived long enough for that to happen too.

  Whenever I see another sign of age it feels like my body is catching up to my soul - which saddens me because often I wish my soul would accommodate itself in my body, taking the time to be in the present, to breathe as light as I should. To enjoy the moment of the present. Instead I am almost always rushing, sometimes to reach others and other times to reach the idea of who I should be. I often think of who I ought to be according to society and it bothers - if I am not pleased with the world I live in, why do I feel my self lacking for conforming perfectly to it?

  The news is overwhelming, from Palestine to my country, to the other side of the world. It's too much to take in without being crushed by it, I envy the people strong enough to stand on their own two legs.  Forests are burning, the government is shutting down more and more places where people found either physical or emotional shelter and in the meantime we grow old and do not notice and do not get angry enough or perhaps we get so angry we drown in our powerlessness.

  She said "Some times I imagine our kids growing up and playing together like we did," and the thought of such children feels so faraway and cut off from us. I smiled and said nothing, the thought of a future where I want children and actually bringing them into this world that I have always longed to escape fills me with shame. Yes, indeed, children are the future, but I always believed that to take upon the role of the parent, one must always strive to make the world better for the future generations instead of dumping it on them and asking them to come up with the solutions. 

  We like to speak of glorious pasts but what of a glorious present?

  Ever since that conversation I look at my aging hands and wonder what small glorious and damning thing have they done today, yesterday, a year before that. My hands have caressed others and held myself, they have made things and washed dishes and cooked dinner. They have planted seeds and watered plants and turned pages and they have traveled many kilometres to hold someone and to trail their fingertips across their backs. They have stayed immobile and done nothing and not called the police, not pushed back, not resisted, not protected. They have typed out long and short messages and snapped photographs and carried furniture and built homes in tiny spaces and looked for the sun.

  My aging hands with their fragile, thin skin have carried all my life across.