Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 7. Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
I have been sitting with this one for a while now.
This photograph has been in my files since the very beginning. The first scan I ever really stopped at. The one that keeps pulling me back no matter how many times I look at it.
My mother on my first day of school.
She is kneeling in front of me. Her hands moving the way her hands always moved. Quick. Certain. Completely sure of what they were doing. I am standing there letting her. The way you let someone who knows exactly what they are doing just do it.
I have looked at this image more times than I can count.
It does the same thing to me every time.
What Stopped Me This Week
What stops me is not the moment.
It is her hands.
And this week something else stopped me too.
I sat at my desk looking at this photograph and I thought about her going home.
She went back to Thailand before she passed. Back to Kamphaeng Phet. Back to the red earth and the Ping River. Back to the language that always fit perfectly in her mouth. She chose that. She knew what she was doing. She carried Thailand inside her for fifty years and at the end she went back to it.
And I was on the other side of the world.
I have been trying to write about that all week and I keep stopping. Not because I don’t have the words. Because the words keep taking me somewhere I am not ready to go yet on the page.
That is what this photograph does to me. I look at her hands fixing my collar on an ordinary morning and I think about how many ordinary mornings there were after that one. And how many there were not. And how she was 8,600 miles away when the last one came.
Between two worlds means carrying both.
It also means sometimes the distance between them is too far to cross in time.
“She did not know what that moment would mean to me. She was just fixing my collar.”
The What If
This week I sat in my chair and looked at the ceiling.
I thought about her going home.
She chose Thailand at the end. She knew what she was doing. Fifty years of carrying it inside her and at the end she went back to it. Back to the red earth. Back to the Ping River. Back to the language that always fit perfectly in her mouth.
And I was on the other side of the world.
I keep coming back to that this week. Looking at this photograph of her hands on an ordinary morning and thinking about the last morning. The one I was not there for. The one that happened 8,600 miles away while I was in Florida.
Between two worlds means carrying both.
It also means sometimes the distance between them is too far to cross in time.
I sat with that for a long time this week.
I did not write very much.
Sometimes that is exactly what the work requires.
“The ordinary morning is the whole story.”
What I Know Now
She was just fixing my collar.
She did not know what that moment would mean to me fifty years later sitting at a desk in Florida trying to find words for what it feels like to live between two worlds. To love two countries. To lose a language at six years old and spend the rest of your life carrying it in your hands instead of your mouth.
She did not know any of that.
She just knelt on a floor on an ordinary morning and made sure her daughter was exactly right before she walked out the door.
That is who she was.
That is what I am trying to write.
I am not ready to tell you everything this photograph means yet.
That is what the book is for.
But I am getting closer.
I am writing it all down.
For Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte.
So they know about the hands.
So they know about the ordinary morning.
So they know they are allowed to live between two worlds without having to choose.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 7 of Her Hands His Eyes , a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
In Entry 8 one of the hardest chapters I have written. I was not expecting it to be the one it was.
