From Heart to The Fingertips

From heart to the fingertips, from fingertips to the heart.

Do you like to walk? I love to. And that’s what I am doing now.

I’ve been asked a thousand times by friends and company: how do you know when you’re in love? Heart and fingertips, that’s how.

I recall my first encounter with love. Love was then a skinny, dark-skinned boy; short and with eyes like bourbon, untidy and shy, very shy. All he could do was attempt to muster up his grains of courage and stare at me for a little while longer than yesterday. For him just that was a brave proposal. After months of noticing him and feigning ignorance, and growing restless of the monotonous gazes and more gazes, I made the first move.

When I saw his eyes lit up with a childlike glow after I told him I liked, not love, liked him, I was then struck by this immense invisible air that I felt wrapping our space. It was heavy but the kind of heavy you felt after downing a plate of sweets, the kind that you feel when you’re falling asleep or waking up from a beautiful dream. My heart felt heavy but it never soared so high before.

Heaviness is underrated, or rather, prejudiced with negative connotation; where in reality, it’s just a magical reminder of your proximity with the ground. The only time you are ever aware of gravity is when you are trying to fly.

For me, it was beautiful how I could feel the ground and the sky at the same time while I’m in the mezzo with him. This beautiful flip, a warm light of gratitude enveloping my heart, it sent tingles down to my fingertips. Magical! I could suddenly touch the air, taste the colors around me and feel and not feel my fingertips at the same time. I wanted nothing else, expected nothing more.

It was love. And it wasn’t just he who I loved; it was everything. He had done his job, kindled what I always had within but never knew how to acknowledge.

I brought my trembling fingers up to his plain cheek, magical! It sent the same feeling back to my heart from the fingertips. Everything was a dream but nothing was ever so vivid before. It felt real, so real than hiding behind all the judgments of good and bad. Everything was one. And everything was love.

Years after that, he kissed another girl of course, and I, another boy. I loved everything the same but, he held a special place in my heart for he was the first to breathe life into me.

I was happy, soaring but my face fell when I first caught the sight of him kissing a new girl last spring, at the tree in this park I’m walking right now, the tree which we once called our shrine; not because the girl was not I but because his bourbon eyes didn’t light up with that childlike glow. He is not in love. And that was the most sorrowful I’ve felt ever since we stopped coming to the park together.

Over the years, my friends kept telling me that they have been "in and out of love". They are more concerned about naming the feeling before feeling it fully, like tourists today are more concerned about clicking and posting the scenery around them than touring. Everybody today is in a hurry to talk it out the moment they start to feel like they are experiencing something. Thus, interrupting the whole experience, changing its natural course. I know, too much to see and too little time but, sometimes when you are running, you are not leaving behind footsteps but unfinished moments. And his bourbon eyes were running.

I haven’t told him the same when I spent the last few weeks by his side as I watched his illness strap him to his bed and mute him. I spoke to him as much as I can despite my new found desire for silence. I mated with the quiet for the most of last year when I went around the world as I let my mind take its turn at the podium. But the same silence coming from him didn’t seem so beautiful. I told him I would always be in love, I can’t imagine otherwise.

Even a strong hammerer’s hand trembles softly in love. If it doesn’t, he needs to melt, allow in the warmth for he has been ice for far too long. And the tired bourbon eyes agreed; I know they did. I caressed his dry cheek, touched his forehead with my trembling fingers. They spoke better than I.

Even when I can’t see him anymore, I would feel his presence as I touch his collection of tools. Some say he loved that collection but he was only trying to fix that child who used to gleam at me. He was embarrassed of him, tried to conceive him, tried to be familiar with knifes, screws and hammers, to screw metal plates all over him and make him tough; make him a man. From fingertips to the mind that never reached his heart.

The skinny, dark skinned boy who had spent 7 months not moving, not talking or so much as looking at something other than his peeling ceiling spoke on his last day. Not with his tongue or his fingertips but with his bourbon eyes. I ran over as soon as the neighbors called and there he was, as frozen as the day before but only, he couldn’t seem to stop crying. I leaned down, held his hand, his fingertips feeling warm for the first time on that bed. I didn’t speak that day; the podium was his. I sat there even after his hands turned cold. I will always be in love. 

I didn’t go home after the funeral this morning. I felt a little wiser and a little childlike and I felt the spring so I started to walk. I and another 4 year old relative who was arriving in late, seemed to be the only ones dressed in color. I walked slow but not in silence. I hummed with the air and passed busy men on the roads, I crossed roads and smiled at the traffic, and I twirled between steps and tried to peek at the sun now and then. And then I opened the gate and I came to the park. Was it always so full of people?

I watch the kids play and yell, mothers sigh in exasperation but laugh out of love; flowers sway and sway and sway.

Everything is in here. The moment before or the moment after doesn’t matter. It is all just now and nothing more, nothing else. I touch the air, taste the colors around me, feel and not feel my fingers at the same time. I am in love.

From fingertips to the heart, from heart to the fingertips.