Such Small Hands

And we didn’t know what to do with our love, either; it was so heavy.

We didn’t know sadness until we had a point of comparison.

Even her face was like ours, though wary and full, like when you got scared. “Her eyes are broken, that’s why she can’t close them. You have to lick her eyeballs so she can see or else she can’t see.” Marina held out her doll; that was the first thing she’d said to us. We stuck our tongues out until the tips touched the cold glass of her eyes. And it was true: the doll could see then.

And yet she didn’t look like us. She had dark-girl eyes. How could we describe her? How could we say, “This is what Marina was like the first time we saw her”? We might get tired, we might start to describe her and then have to keep going back to clarify things, and nothing we said would be right except for the feeling that you couldn’t really see all the way inside that girl.

Faith in that belief, even just for a moment, is all it takes for everything to change.

Suddenly there were hands that we didn’t recognize, and we became strangers.