The Map of What Remains

It is 3:15 am. The house is holding its breath, and I am looking at the lines on my own palms, wondering if they are becoming deeper or just more tired. We spend our youth trying to smooth out the surface, terrified of the marks that experience leaves behind. We want to be blank pages. But in the dark, you realize that a life without lines is a life that hasn’t touched anything. Every crease is a record of a weight held, a door opened, or a hand let go. We are all just walking archives of things we have survived. The skin thins, the map becomes more intricate, and eventually, the story is written entirely on the outside. It is a strange comfort to know that even when we stop speaking, our bodies will continue to tell the truth about where we have been. Does the skin ever forget the things it has had to carry?

Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this quiet truth in his image titled Old Hands. It is a stark reminder of the histories we carry in our skin, and I wonder, what story do your own hands tell when you aren’t looking?