Naomi Anne Goldner
Commitment: A Definition
When we finally get there, he takes my hand and turns it over, carefully tracing the lines in my palm. I watch him, first following his finger, then looking up at his face traced with its own deep forest lines, the kind that are carefully etched without hesitation but with a certain degree of uncertainty.
When you have a kid or two or maybe three, time becomes the closing of a school year, the fallen teeth, the broken arm healed after crossing off days on a calendar taped to the side of the small bed, marking each day closer to whatever the future landmark is: a vacation, a birthday, the end of a week, awaiting a visit from a long-distant grandparent who will be met at the airport, greeted by a little heart pounding out of a chest, out of a body squirming on a hard plastic chair eagerly watching the faces of those who reunite—tears of joy, of loss, of happiness. When you have a kid, time breaks off like chunks of a chocolate bar streaking your palm with melting sweetness that you lick before you go on to consume what you broke off as you were standing in your kitchen waiting for the onions to sweat into the oil, before you added the garlic not-too-soon so it wouldn’t go bitter on you. When you have kids, time is measured by the size of their waist in their jeans, by the ankles exposed one morning after a night of sudden growth, by once-beloved toys now left in corners to gather dust until both you and they look longingly into the past and remember when those blocks were stacked every morning, those trains made to follow the track around and around and around for hours, guided by a chubby hand, by a thick layer of skin on the knees from living so close to the ground.
My palm promises that all will be good, that time will be on my side as I take this sledgehammer and shatter all I know to be true, to be whole—everything which has kept this world making sense. He can’t read lines, he can’t see the future, he knows not where his lines meet mine because to know that you’d have to touch palms, you’d have to see the world in chunks of chocolate, in hair being cut then grown then cut, in a face that changes though you can’t see the change because you are never gone long enough. Your palm screams time, it sings muse, it is steady under his care as he holds it up to the light now to get a better look. He sees plowed-through fields, tunnels that have no end in sight, he sees lakes where you float for eternity, sour grass sucked between your teeth; in your palms, he sees lines too deep to have been born with, deep grooves where you planted seeds, now about to bloom. He kisses your palm where he finds the hole in the center, through which you can see the sky at night, his tongue moves slowly, feeling the space left, and it tickles, and you giggle, and he’s smiling, you can see his cheeks rising on the sides of his face, and for once, you know he knows even though he may not have always known, and for once those lines in your palms tell a story of distant lands where the golden dunes don’t burn your feet, where you can rest your head and sink your body with ease into the soft sand, where you can feel that fluid golden silk sieving through your hands, filling each and every crevice, every canyon, every line carefully carved into your hands.
Naomi Anne Goldner is a San Francisco-based writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She holds an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University, and her work has been published in various journals including Entropy Magazine, The Blue Nib Literary Review, Quiet Lightning, The Festival Review, to name a few. Founder of WordSpaceStudios Literary Arts Center and Chariot Press Literary Journal, she is currently editing her first novel which spans four generations and three continents.