my job one day was to attach wristbands to the wrists of customers who wished to see a band's acoustic in-store performance. i encountered all types of wrists: hairy & cumbersome trucker wrists, swathed in grime; the thin & anemic wrists of little girls, shaking like trapped does; tattooed wrists of virile young men & coquettish young women; shy & reserved wrists of reclusive and awkward pubescent girls; wrinkled & worn wrists of the elderly, almost blue in their age; and more.
if you place your hands upon the pulse of life as i did, you will feel the power that flows under the skin... memories, rationalizations, wonder, confusion & sorrow, guilt and grace. secrets the body keeps, pumping through crimson gateways, hidden forever. a present forever passing, circulating & recycling... a reality only the owners of the wrists can understand.
when you paint the walls with your blood, when you seep into the floor, your microcosm becomes known. all your secret lies, buried fears, neuroses, hopes, and whatever dreams remain in you are exposed to the aether. you are absorbed into the earth. guilt to brambles, dreams to birds, sorrow to rivers. you flee your coil and melt into the ocean, forever to reflect off the caps of cresting waves, to become the patience of the deep. and that last spark of consciousness that flees... that last regretful glance at your broken body, that last, sorrowful sigh... it becomes moonlight. forever bathing the rest of us in your gentle & unknowable glow.
(slightly modified from a prior version)
