Why is it that whenever I find a nice-looking person with a well-taken photo and excelent presentation and clever things to say and interesting stories to tell, they're from parts foreign? It's become so much of a trend that I can now identify if someone is from the States or not by looking at the quality of thier picture alone, with a very slight margin of error.
Of course, 'we' (being the US) have our quality people... but still. I can almost always spot one of our beautiful Sweedes or Germans or Dutch ETers immediately.



Also, they very rarely have names like [KaylaKryptonite].
I wonder why...

Ever feel like saying something profound?

That feeling that lodges just under your shoulder blades, and rises in spasms 'till it encompaces the back half of your brain in a tingling shell... it insists that if you could say something beautifully true right now, everything would be alright.

I've tried, too.
But everything always comes out angry or forced and harsh and a day later I've either impressed no one, or I have no friends left. It's a fight to be understood. It's a fight against yourself when you know that everyone else is probably right and you're not nearly as complicated as you think and it's not really cool to be mysterious when everybody knows you better than you know yourself...
But sometimes... sometimes you just have that tingle in your braincase that tells you to shine.
And I feel so dull.

My hands.

The fingers are long, gently curving, tapering to rounded, broad tips with fat pads and prints like canyons. The nails are set deep into each finger, tracing just short of the edge, where each philangie begins it's curve to the underside. Clean, tan, freckled on each scarred knuckle, faint hairs trace thier ways along the crests of each vessel that weaves it's way just beneath the surface. Shallow lines start at the knuckles, and wander to the pale underside, where they deepen, crease, and fold into one another into a vast map that even my memory cannot hold. Begin with one line, though, and you'll eventually trace them all, and arrive at the center, where all the lines converge and split, branching thier ways outward again.
A ring, on the finger of the same name of the left hand. It's tarnished, grey, it's letters still visible outlined in their inset blue shield. CTR, like a family crest.
Another, on the mid finger of the right hand, deeply tarnished and corroded before it's time. Faint etchings trace it's surface, winding like vines round and round the finger, branching faint silver leaves where now there is copper, spots of black reminding that it once was another kind of beautiful...
My hands. Piano player's hands... hands that have learned to write, swim, type, and hold fast... that have learned the loving touch, to form a fist, and to hold onto the most ephemeral things. Hands. Two of them. And they're mine, inexplicably mine