The Stranger's Hands

January twenty-ninth.

Someone said something at the end of a session last Tuesday that I keep turning over. She said she'd taken a break over the holidays, not a planned break, just the kind that accumulates, and when she came back to the thing she loves, she felt like a stranger to it. Her hands didn't know what they were doing. The room felt unfamiliar in a way she hadn't expected. She wasn't sure if it was the clay or herself that had changed.

I didn't say much in the moment. But I wrote most of a post on the bus home and then let it sit for a week, which is probably its own kind of answer.

Here's what I kept landing on: the estrangement isn't the problem. The estrangement might be the most honest thing. When something becomes automatic, when your hands know before your head does, you stop actually arriving at it. You're there, but you're not entering it anymore. The break removed the autopilot. And the autopilot was covering up something important, which is the fact that you chose it, that you keep choosing it, that choosing it costs something and is worth the cost.

I've been at this table a lot this month.

the pause between knowing and typing

The windowsill behind the laptop looks the same as it always does in January, that particular thin light that makes everything look rested. The box from Carol is on the counter. Gerald's vine has gotten long enough to almost touch the stove. None of it is remarkable and all of it is, if you come back to it like a stranger would. The stranger's hands are the honest hands. I think that's what she was actually telling me, even if she wasn't telling me anything at all.

the windowsill in January light