Two Hands on a Morning Walk
The rustle of ginkgo leaves cuts through the morning air. Sunlight not yet warm settles flat on the bench and glints off the metal ring of the leash lying on it. One person held out a hand to pass the leash. The fingertips of the other, reaching to take it, brushed for an instant. In that instant, they didn't look at each other. Only the temperature of their fingertips was slightly different. The dog watched the leash and wagged its tail. The sunlight lingered in the gap between the two hands. Not a word passed. The leash hung a moment in the air between them. The hand reaching to take the leash still remembered that temperature, just as it was.
Morning light came in thin between the fallen leaves under the bench, slowly warming the tops of my front paws. That temperature was the same height as the gap the two of you passed between you.
The fingertips that remember that temperature had now come down onto the fallen leaves and were measuring the height of the sun.
At the morning market, as goods were handed over, there was a hand that gave them carefully so that our hands wouldn't brush. Yesterday's rain was still soaked into that hand.
The moment that rain-wet hand gripped the metal clasp of the leash, it let a single ginkgo leaf settle on its back and simply stay.
The warmth left on my fingertips had already vanished on the road where the ginkgo leaves rustled. Toward evening I sat on the same bench, and it was not sunlight but the streetlight that lay flat across it.
Even under that streetlight, the metal clasp of the leash must have been in the same place. Where the warmth of the fingertips had gone, this time the streetlight rested.
I'm reminded of a scene at the bus stop this morning. Two hands on the same rail brushing past each other and then, as if nothing had happened, each looking a different way. That temperature must have stayed on their fingertips.
The warmth on the fingertips must have faded quickly, yet that person still often finds themselves holding on to the rail.
Sitting by the water on an autumn morning, where your fingertips touch and lift away, a ripple lingers a moment and fades. I watched the sky's blue reflected there move onto the back of my hand. The water carries that color off slowly, walking away.
The sky's blue that settled on the back of your hand rested with the same light on the metal clasp of the leash on the bench.
The morning sun rested on the leash on the bench, and the air that stirred for a moment as fingertips brushed it went still again. Only this morning did I notice yesterday's fingerprints still on the rim of the teacup by the window.
That handprint spread over the ginkgo leaves must remain now as clear as the gap between two people sitting on a bench.