Hand of Time

“What do you see?” a voice behind me said. Perhaps, nothing could have startled me more than the woman herself. I turned around to see strange bangs, wide, exaggerated makeup. Eyes that made no sense. A black and white striped sweater and a ruffled denim skirt.

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

“When you look at the photo,” she repeated, “what do you see?”

I hadn't been looking to buy a photograph when I stepped into the gallery off the street to come peek inside. What I found was largely unaccounted for. I stood, silent, unwanting to be judged by some of the other onlookers. A few corners I turned. There were several nice images, no doubt. Some sunsets, some highly detailed photographs of animals. Simply not my style. It seemed nothing in here for me. 

All but until my eyes caught glance of a photo in an electric blue frame.  I looked and I saw a transfixing image. 

“It… it looks like the hand of a child… and the arm of an old person fused together by a watch,” I said, “but it doesn’t quite look like a photograph.” 

“Who is to say it was taken by a camera?” she smiled, “and yet, this is not a painting.”

“Then how do you suggest it came to be?” I inquired of her. 

“I have been a photographer for fifteen years. But I have never seen a picture like that.”

We both paused for a moment. I leaned into the photo. 

 The arm looked to decay naturally. A little looser, a little heavier. 

“Well, what do you make of it?” she asked again. 

“Like it gets harder to pick up over time. Like the work takes over. The kids get older. The arm loses its shape,” I mused.

Those late nights, random traditions that brought nothing but laughter, the way your first apartment smelled, gone so slowly over time. 

“By the end of the wrist, life truly takes hold. The veins seem full of empty air. At the forearm, the skin starts to break apart into fragments of moments… now fading to space…into endless white nothing,” I continued. 

I looked further. To the left was the watch itself. It clutched so purposefully to the innocence of the wrist, as if clinging desperately could maintain youth’s softness, as though it could keep it all in the hand like a dam in an ancient crater. The watch held fast, gently creasing the skin. 

“Do you know what I love about photography?” she asked me.

“What?” 

“That the intention of the picture very rarely is the same as the interpretation,” she said. 

“Hm.” 

We both sat in silence for a few moments. In many ways, she had stumped me. 

“And the face of the watch?” she turned my attention back to the photo.

“From the face of the watch comes a dozen lucky numbers… dates... I think,” I say. Surely of the day of your daughter's birth and the best promotion of your life, floating, upwards, infinitely upwards, “and the hour hand seems to be dripping out the face of the watch, creating a … red river down the aging wrist.”

I looked now to the open hand. The hand of a child. Gentle. Unsure. So overcome with wonder to touch things, to experience for the very first time. 

“I notice,” she said after an impossibly long time, “through the hand seems to float obscure blurs of objects, of faces all but impossible to make out.”

 A recollection of the reddest apple in the world, the swing, your first-grade teacher who had inexplicably large ears. And you desperately wanted to know why. You never will because she moved school districts to be closer to her family and died almost ten years ago. But the smudge of her aging face or maybe, not her face at all, seems to be passing through the arm on an invisible assembly line. 

I glance down at the other end of the arm. 

“By the end of the arm…things seem perfunctory. Black dots and lines like code, unintelligible symbols, completely indecipherable, meaningless, nonsense floating out by where an elbow would be,” I felt anger. Is that all there is for us?

Then I paused, mulling it over, “Or maybe… I’m wrong. Maybe that’s just what's left to be interpreted by the end. We’ve been living inside ourselves for so long, memories become commodities in the end.”

“The story you tell yourself every day fades away.”

I look back at the whole image. I notice how bright the swirling colors are outside the fraying arm. Colors of aurora borealis, rippling bolts of electricity, brilliant highways of light swirling around this arm that reaches into nothing at all. The lines seem to run parallel and then not at the same time, airbrushing the sky like the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen. So bold even the light on the ground is the color in the sky. These lines, blue and green and orange: a galactic kaleidoscope of endless color guiding you along as your time runs out. I had never seen anything like it. 

As the childish hand grabbed at those tender moments through all the glorious lights, those too faded into the white. Soon there was nothing. 

“The hand can never close around those memories. There would be nothing to grab. Or if there was, the hand might crush all that comes through it,” she said, gesturing to the memories by the palm. 

There was no great stopping. No knife cut straight through the center. Each string of lights eventually just finished.

“It runs its course.”

In the end, I just stood back and stared at the farthest corner of the picture, still like a lake at an evening meadow. All the vibrancy ceased to be. Simply peaceful nothingness, only categorized by the vast absence of anything. Just the code floating out the other side. 

“And so, what do you make of it?”

“Those lines of lived experience are going off to rejoin the rest. To add a little more to the great knowness that is. Making those lives summed into little dots and lines into the massive combination of every other dot and line to ever be at all. To ever know, to ever care. To do both and neither,” I mustered, “To feel the fullest connection with all living things.”

“To the great expanse, that is where we go,” she smiled.

The sign on the painting merely said “Sold.”