HOLDING HANDS
Prompt - Holding hands : Write about the first time you help someone's hand
It had felt like it would never get to this point. It had felt like we would always get to this point. It felt... like a beginning, except it wasn't, it was just one more step in the story, a story which nobody knew how and when the end would ever come.
I saw her first from behind, walking down the corridor and heading for the door into the sun. In an office of more than six hundred random bodies it took something to stand out. So what was it that made me stare? The walk? The scarf artfully arranged across the shoulders? The hair? All and none of these? I was no believer in the arcane notion of fate, but there can still be a sense of moment, of now and it meaning more than the moment before. Mundanely special.
No turn of the head as she left the building. I followed her, pleased to see she was heading in the direction of where my car lay parked. As, no doubt, did hers. Or was someone waiting for her? I put on a bit more speed, so I was passing her just after we'd crossed the road, but didn't dare look across. Instead I went to my car, put the key in the lock (no remotes in those olden times!), and looked up. In time to see her pass. She looked at me. And looked away. No smile. No sense of connection. On her side. But me? I... needed to know. I had no idea what it was, but I knew I needed to know it.
I sat in my car until she passed, noting colour, model, registration. Bright orange, so it would be easy to spot. If I needed to spot it. Drove home, sat, pondered. A couple of hours before my wife got in, Tuesday was her late night, and dinner wouldn't take me long, so thinking time was available.
Who was she? Where in the huge complex we'd emerged from did she work? Name, rank, serial number? And the most baffling scary question of them all - how could I get to talk to her? I found an answer. I knew it wasn't really an answer, but it was the only one I'd got. A letter. Left under the wiper behind that orange bonnet. Saying... Hope flew out of one window and in another. saying whatever came into my head, however mad. Anonymous. A dramatic gesture of... bafflement? I had no idea what any of this really meant.
The letter was written, placed, seen to have vanished, presumably read. But what next? Even if she hadn't been horrified by the strangeness of the contents, she had no idea who I was? Or I her. But I would. However long it took.
Months passed. Bit by bit I filled in the jigsaw. She worked in the same building as me, and there was the sky, dotted with clouds, peering out. She worked on the first floor, and there was the grass at the foot of the picture, a hint of the dogs legs in sight. She often worked late, and the dogs, and the sheep they herded, came to life. Walking with a colleague we passed her on the stairs, they exchanged greetings, and from that I found out her name. I had my shepherd, I had the image on the box lid. But I still didn't know what to do with it.
My own job suddenly offered a link. I went into a room looking for a woman I needed to talk to and there she was. There they both were, for the person I sought was her boss. Was she looking at me as I had my tedious conversation? Was she aware of how much I wanted to look at her? I risked a smile in that direction as I left, and almost skipped out the door when it was returned.
I walked along that corridor often enough, trying to look purposeful, but there always seemed to be someone still with her in that room. Until one day. When I couldn't do it, and walked on. Why risk my expectations? I sulked back to my room, and trembled in fury at my own cowardice.
That corridor drew me back. That room, and the mystery behind a desk. And one evening I found myself in there and asking for her boss and I knew she'd gone home and it would just be us and I babbled something and she babbled something and together we babbled and then I left. No sulk this time, just a dire need to draw in breath, to make myself believe that I'd done what I didn't think I'd do and wanted to do again. Is breathlessness the same as love?
A week passed, I returned, our babbling now more purposeful, more probing, finding out, facts, the trivia of lives, tentative bond building. Another visit. Another. Conscious that this would soon be seen by people, the wrong people, that stories would flow. That this needed to come to some kind of ending, or beginning. We talked again. We talked about that need to end. We talked with sadness. The point was reached. My hand met hers, held on. She squeezed back. I suggested lunch. Some time. She said no. She said no. I let go. The end had come.
As I reached the door she said "But I do want to see you again". I looked back, I looked into those tentatively smiling eyes, I looked at the hand I'd just held. The end hadn't come. I was looking at a beginning.
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