But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice.
Involuntarily I begin to hear myself breathing. I start huffing as my chest expands beyond the vertical plane of my downward-angled chin. My eyes become wet. I feel my lips pursing, my teeth locking, and my countenance turning sour. I pick up a hand, turning it over and back, studying it like foreign object, a baffling attribute: what sort of creature am I, are we? Why do I feel this?
I look up at Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic, which is stacked on other books in my tiny office, and I am confused. This is the place where I come to work and to worry about matters pertaining to my future. The only thing I'm supposed to feel in here is crushing anxiety, profound self-centeredness, and the need to advance my professional career. And yet, despite how future-oriented I must be at this stage in my life, I have been moved by a story about a person who has no future at all.
In these moments I look at my hands, because they are the parts of me that I can see that remind me of my humanity. When I look at my hands I can also see my brother's hands when he was just born and, at three years old, I was deeply afraid of losing my relevance. And I can see my mother's hands, and my father's hands, my grandparents' hands, the hands of women I've loved; all the hands I've held in my hands. My favorite parts are the tops of the palms, just before the fingers take form, which are slightly puffy, and resemble pads or paws. I can look at my pads and see that this is precisely the type of creature I am: like every other creature that has once crawled: finite.
