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Lauren McGuinn

Ms. Gardner

English 10H/6

30 January 2017

The Hands of Life

Who can make it across the monkey bars the fastest? my best friend Kara would say

every lunch on the Sonoma Mountain Elementary School playground. After the lunch breaks of

swinging on the monkey bars with Kara, racing each other back and forth, calluses formed on my

delicate, slim hands. My calluses released splotches of blood over time. That day in class as Ms.

Vollert taught us our addition and subtraction tables. I held my hands up to my bulging, deep

blue ocean eyes, fascinated with my callused skin, touching and picking at it, smelling the metal

that was imprinted on my skin from the monkey bars. I never failed to not notice the healing of

my calluses, my skin cleansing itself with fresh skin, piecing itself back together and leaving

behind the old skin.

As a first grader at time, my hands already experienced the wonders of playing with my

parents car keys as a baby, picking apart pieces of food in a high chair, holding a pencil for the

first time, gripping the chains on the swings, the motions of going up and down a piece of paper

with a Crayola crayon while drawing stick figures and rainbows. Over the summer at the Boys &

Girls Club going into fourth grade, I successfully executed my first volleyball serve. Throwing

the ball up in the air from the base of my tan hands, perfectly connecting with the middle of my

palm. With extreme force I swung and managed to get the ball over what seemed like a towering,

monstrous net. My hands were a light red with a pale pink tint, and were dry from the dust and

dirt on the floor that managed to hug the surface of ball. I held up my right hand to my ocean
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blue eyes and knew volleyball was all I wanted. Similar to a fortune teller, I read my hands to see

the future dreams, and I look at them with reminiscence of the past holding my childhood

calluses, successes, scars, and discoveries. Hands are stories worth telling. In one of the greatest

Shakespearean plays, Macbeth, Macbeth tries to wash his evil past of killing king Duncan from

his hands with water. He continues to live with guilt every time he glances at his hands. The past

can not be washed from the hands, they shape who you are, and tell you where youll be and who

youll be. Why else do police yell, hands up! or let me see your hands! towards suspects?

Why else do we put our hands up while dancing to our favorite song in our bedroom or at a

school dance?

Age ten. I got my first pair of rollerblades for my birthday. While skating down the

smooth sidewalks of my quiet neighborhood, I hit a sprinkler pipe on the edge of the grass. With

instincts, I fell backward, hands behind, scraping the warm September sidewalk. Peeled skin

oozed with a blanket of blood over it. My mother and Nana would always comment on how

beautiful my hands looked, they still do to this day, but at the time as a ten year old, I thought I

had ruined them. I sprinted into the kitchen where my mother was. Lets run some water under

them, she says while petting my scraped hands, look at those beautiful hands of yours, she

mentions in awe. Obviously the skin on my hands healed, I still have two miniature scars from it.

I accept them and appreciate them, knowing that I can carry my past with me everyday with my

hands. According to Desert Hand Therapy, Fingerprints are a completely unique DNA imprint

that is different in every single human being. No two human beings in the world have similar

fingerprints. The past and future told by my hands build my own identity, an identity that is only

owned by myself, and no one else in the world.

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Around years eleven and twelve, I deeply struggled with my appearance and accepting

natural beauty. Self confidence was out of my grasp. In my youthful mind, I continually

compared myself to others, constantly looking down on myself thinking, Im not as pretty as her;

however, I never doubted the beauty I saw in my hands. The carved lines that run throughout the

hand, my long, dainty, skinny fingers, scars, calluses. Self love can be found but is never lost. I

found my own beauty in my hands, and continued to make my way through my body, accepting

each bit and piece of myself with confidence. My past, future, dreams, and self love are held

together and intertwined in the palm of my hand.

My mother has a book on the coffee table in our living room named Michelangelo. The

thick, luxurious book is consumed with Michelangelos greatest works and articles on his pieces

of art and their history. I oftenly found myself going through it while watching Zoey 101 on Teen

Nick. I studied the details of his richly detailed piece of work The Creation of Adam. It captures

Adam and God with their muscular, broad hands barely touching. The painting spoke to me

through their hands, opened up the reasons and meanings behind our hands, and the beauty and

humanity they obtain. From being a toddler, grasping my mothers finger with my small, dainty

hands, to a sixteen year old now, the act of holding hands with my loved ones resembles trust and

vulnerability. Their pasts, dreams and identities are visible in the palms of my own hands as I

hold them close, intertwined with my own.

Kara moved away to Georgia in third grade. Although we distantly kept in touch, I knew

when she looked at her callused hands from the monkey bars at her new school she thought of

our friendship, while I knew when I looked at mine it reminded me of the same. Growing in and

out of insecurities, my hands are the only thing I have accepted of myself. My hands prove to me

I am destined for greatness in the future through the symmetrical lines that make the hand. Scars
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and calluses hold my early years while allowing me to take the risks I did to which got me here,

they resemble my natural beauty. My hands made me the person I am today. Mirroring the

constellations and stars at night, the lines on my hands trace images of my past, between the

calluses, scars, marks holding them in place, tied with acceptance of self love and sightings of

the future and dreams. Hands are stories worth telling.