MY HANDS.
Art : AYA.
By Sakuan.
They provide for me and my loved ones. I care about them, they are important, more important than I ever thought, more important than I could ever imagine. They feed me, I use them to brush my teeth, I open doors with them, I itch myself with them, and they help me drink my coffee every morning. I use them to pleasure myself in various ways, whether it be cuddling with a partner or dancing, I use them to work out. I don’t think I would be as fast as I am at running if they didn’t exist, they balance my body. Now that I think about it, I’m grateful for my hands, never thought I would ever say those words a day in my life, I take it for granted, can you blame me for that? We all do, you sit every day but don’t think anything of it until you fall ill and lose the ability to do something as simple as sitting down, then you will understand the feeling, the pain of uneasiness. Life is structured in a way where we don’t necessarily care that much for simple obvious things that we do from day to day, something as simple as breathing. You realize you take breathing for granted when you have a cold and get a stuffy nose. To you that might be annoying now imagine those people who live their whole lives with severe cases of asthma, I can’t begin to imagine the distress they go through, mind you there are even worse case scenarios than asthma.
My hands as a way of living.
My hands are clean, I’ve touched a lot of things in my lifetime, some great, some wonderful, some nasty, some alive, some unpredictable, some predictable. I love it, my hands are probably one of the most important things in the world, I feel for those without. Without hands my current life wouldn’t make too much sense, I make art, I write, I consider those two things as the backbone of my life, they ground me, they make me feel like I belong, they make me feel like I mean something in this world full of uncertainty. Without them, my life would have little to meaning at all, or I would have taken a different trajectory altogether, it feels great to have something to live for, something to make you feel like you belong in a society, something to assure you you’re not wasting your life doing nothing. I still believe I’m lucky to have something that helps me do what I really love doing, something that keeps my head up straight every time I feel down, every time I feel like I have nothing to live for, I don’t feel that way anymore because I found drawing and writing, two years ago, my life was at a place I wasn’t proud of, I was simply existing. If you were to ask me, “justify your existence,” I wouldn’t have an answer for you. Now if you ask me the same question, I can simply send you to my website and it feels good to have something that shows what you’ve been doing for the last few years.
Currently reading [God is Not One by Stephen Prothero]
