Fold your hands, child

Show me your hands,” she says, and I do, unrolling my fingers like a carpet of welcome, exposing the tell-tale network of lines on my palms and fingers, lines that she will read as if they spelled actual words. The line of the sun, the line of Mercury, bars and dots, chains and islands, rings of Saturn and Solomon. These lines, I have been led to believe, can tell a story, can tell my story. This young woman before me — her name is Maria, a name that has always interested me by being both evocative and borderline anonymous — slips her hands underneath mine, supporting the unfurled bowl my palms have created, from underneath.

A light rain is falling tonight, intermittently; it comes and goes, as if someone’s playing with the controls. It’s a night for staying in, for listening to The Sundays or Belle & Sebastian or the Cocteau Twins. Instead, troubled by a week of dreams of you, I have gone to a friend’s house, a friend who can read palms, or more accurately, read people, read lives.

“The way someone opens their hands to me tells me a lot, right away,” Maria says, and already, I have the hollow feeling of having somehow done something wrong, even though her voice is reassuring, gentle. “You’re a fairly open person,” and here she looks directly at me, “but you always hold something back.” She drops her gaze to my hands again. “Look, you’re showing your palms to me, but your hands are still slightly curled inwards, like you want to hide something.”

“How do other people show their hands to you?” I ask, a little defensively. Maria smiles a huge smile, and says, “Some people just do this—” and she throws her hands open in a gesture both fearless and nonchalant, her palms forming a wide open plane, nothing to hide, “and then some will do this.” She curls her hands until you can barely see her palms through the instant cage created by her huddled fingers. “They’ll do that, and I’ll ask them, no, open your hands, and they’ll insist, ‘What? They’re open.’”

I try to lay my hands out the way she did, try to make them honest and open, but I realize to my surprise that it is almost impossible for me, that I can only hold that position for a few moments — my skin feels stretched beyond its limits, my hands want to snap back, hide themselves. 

During the course of this session, Maria will tell me many true things about myself, about my family, my vocation, the direction my life is going. I will not tell her that what I really want to hear about is you, that what I really want is some sort of explanation for what happened to us.

Maria’s gift manifested itself years ago; she has given readings like this to people from all walks of life, from the destitute to the ridiculously wealthy. It has given her a marvelously open outlook on all of humanity. From all these trips through people’s souls, she concludes, “We’re all the same.” Her eyes light up as she says this. “We are all one.”

It is not an explanation, or at least not one that I can understand, yet. Like a song, it is perhaps something one needs to feel more than fully comprehend, and with that feeling might come some sort of acceptance or peace.

“We all want happiness. We all have these great dreams and huge fears. And we all want to love.”