I can forgive him because of his hands. They are not particularly beautiful hands. Men with beautiful hands make my knees weak, but I came to love his anyways. I knew how they moved, held a fork, touched my face, wrote a letter, prayed, held mine, were still. When our lives fell apart I kept imagining those hands that I knew so well and held so dear, and all of the secrets they had kept, and places they had been before they came back to me, and it made me ill in all the ways you can be.

His hands are never still anymore. It is one of the few physical reminders to me of what has happened to this boy I grew up with, when everything else is so internal. Now, they move nervously in clenching and unclenching motions, fingers squeezing fists tight and then loosening in sudden moments of determined relaxation.

He called me up, alone and in need of help. He sat in my car, crying. His hands shook. The hands that had been so courageous and arrogant and funny and tender to me for so many years were shaking in sorrow and fear and I felt ill again, not because of how he had hurt me, but because of how he had hurt himself. I wanted to lay peace over those hands like a blanket and whisper to them to be still. I wanted to force grace upon them, forgiveness, for my own comfort as much as for his.

I do what I can, offer what I have, his hands still shake. I forgive him because his hands make me cry in anger and sorrow and loss. They are like the gnarled fingers of Arthritis, indicators of an illness gone unchecked. I can hardly breathe some days when I see them clenching and twitching, their beauty lost, their love deserted, their shame so thick and powerful. Who am I to deny those hands forgiveness? How could I not?