The Delicacy Of Holding

I never learnt the delicacy of holding, or the secret of the gentle touch. I always had hands that seemed too big or too clumsy for this delicate world; a world that can so easily fall apart in such careless hands as mine.

Over time I learnt how to keep my distance from beauty, how to keep my fingers away from the flimsy delicacy that blooms under this warming sun. I learnt to look and not to touch and to turn away before the beauty faded and fell to the ground.

Those bare green shoots were always too frail, too tentative, for me to take into a protective gentle hold. I knew that I should step back, away; leave them to their fate, even if it was to be killed by the sudden sharp frosts that this world can spread across the unwary.

I thought she would know from the way I looked across at her from a distance that she was the one, and I think she did. From the way she looked back I thought she knew. I also thought she knew from the way I looked that I did not dare reach out a hand towards her, that the risk would be too great that these big rough hands would end up destroying the very reason they reached out to her. Not, of course, through malice or cruelty, but by being unlearnt in the art of the gentle, of not really knowing how to be tender.

Then, though, when I dared to look again, she had gone and her space in the room was empty: from then was the time I began to learn the art of the gentle as I tended my own delicate sorrow.