The plane is stuffed full of artificial air that can’t decide what temperature to be. When it tilts, the sun pushes dull rays of heat in through the scratched, double layered plastic windows. It feels familiar and determined compared to the small stream of conditioned air that’s hitting me from the nozzle on the ceiling above my head. I want to reach up and twist it closed, but there are people on either side of me and the cuff on my shirt isn’t long enough. Reaching up meant exposing the make-shaft bandage of toilet paper and medical tape I threw together in the airport bathroom after I realized how dirty the original one had become. The wounds would be obvious. I sink deeper into my sweatshirt.
I look across the aisle at my father. He has his Bible with the brown and wrinkled leather cover laid out on the fold out table in front of him. His hands trace over the sentences as he reads slowly, with so much concentration it looks like his eyes hurt. I look at his fingers. Even as a child I had been fascinated with my daddy’s hands. They were thick, each finger like a tree trunk rooted in concrete. When I was in girl scouts as a child, we had a father-daughter square dance. I was so proud when I realized that my dad was the only man there whose hands didn’t feel limp, like soft dough. There were solid and square, and they made my hands feel so small inside of them.
At school, I would spend every second of my free time on the monkey bars, swinging up and down them, over and over again to show my daddy the calluses I had accumulated. I didn’t want the small, soft hands of a girl; I wanted my daddy’s hands, built up from years of gymnastics, construction and working on cars. Dirty, with black stained cuticles and hard, yellowed skin. Scarred and defined. Each wrinkle and line had its place. They were hands that made our money and gave him a place in the world.
I felt so sad, watching him. Knowing that the scars I had now weren’t going to make him proud. I had surrendered to the soft hands of girl-ness and given my heart to a boy that used his hands to disengage the locks of cars, or wrap around my neck when he had been having a bad day. He didn’t build things; he destroyed them. He destroyed me, and I hid under the sleeves of my sweater, waiting to heal.
