Nothings Changed :: Papers

Nothing's Changed When you phoned last night I was clipping my nails. I stood at the window of my bedroom; the phone cradled between my chin and shoulder, and clipped my nails as I listened to your voice. It had, after all, been some time since I heard it and I was, as ever, mesmerised. "I'm coming to town on Friday. I thought we could meet for a drink or something," you said, as if we were and always had been quiet, calm friends. "Sure. Sounds good." I watched the tiny clippings, brittle slivers of dead cells, fall to the floor. We arranged a meeting and you hung up. I remained at the window, the phone burning the palm of my hand. Eventually I replaced it on the hook and sat on the table overlooking the street below. I placed my hands palm down, feeling the cold on my skin. To drown the memory of your voice I looked at them minutely. My nails were short and functional, with sharp edges, not the perfectly soft rounded ones of before. My hands. The lifetime of hands; the language of hands. Here were the scars of a lifetime spent trying to unearth something, what I wasn't sure. My hands have aged with me, the knuckles have become red raw from the years of slave driving manual work, scars from unforgotten accidents, a story behind each one. I turned them over to look at the palms, lined now, the heel roughened by years. There was a scar beneath my ring, whitened by time. The silver mood ring, which flashes golden in the sun, and burns red whenever you are near. Do you remember the night you gave it to me? The first time you whispered in my ear that you loved me, and the expression on your face when I said it back? These hands, they had held starfish and crabs, caught by my brother and father on the long summers days spent at the beach down in Sussex where my grandmother lived by the sea.