Letter to your tender hands from my open palms

Just another day — on my usual strolls, I heard the wind murmuring to the sunflowers about a pair of tender hands. 

Hands — 
I found myself eavesdropping, and the wind caught me, stealing their secrets into mine.
Guilty of this soft theft, she punished me — 
cursed me with the memory of roads never taken, with the map of your skin drawn in a language my fingers never learned. And thus —

Do your hands hold the warmth of hibiscus blooms at dawn?

Where your engravings should be, I hold their antonyms — ghosts pressed into skin.

I have carried that sentence in silence. Each night, when curiosity keeps me wide-eyed, sewing stars into quiet questions:

Do your hands shape the quiet art I know?
Does the cold find them, cruel and slow?
Do butterflies dream in your palms’ soft crease?
Who holds them now, when mine find no peace?

Does wax ebb and flow, candlelight’s prayer,
When your hands rise up through the silent air?

How do I teach my palms to burn — 
Not with fire, but with warmth that yearns?

Can your fingertips catch the flutter, quiet as a lullaby?

There is an absence of skin between these empty palms — 
clenched not in anger, but in rehearsal for a hold that never comes.
That absence has a shape. It moves through my days with ease — but my nights? Oh, my nights bruise around it. And in those bruises, your name is carved by the sharp air we both breathe — the same, yet different.

I reach for hands that live somewhere between the hush of heartbeats and heartbreak. 
The space between us — 
 a folding tension — 
 blooms into a garden of your shadows.

The wind still carries your name through the hollow fields I wander. And the sunflowers bloom with thoughts that carry my soft shame. Lullabies rise with the petals, and dawn breaks gently, humming songs I cannot finish alone.

I miss the pair of palms that could meet mine — and settle.

Can your palms carry the hush of a sigh?

But —

If ever you find yourself
 clenching your fists — 
 not in fear, nor fury,
 but to hold the same tender ache,
 unready, yet full of care — 
 may the wind carry you my touch:
 quiet as breath, folded in hush.

And there — 
 in the stillness between reaching and being reached — 
 may you feel my hands:
 open,
 waiting,
 remembering you.

With quiet hope, and open palms,
 a pair of tender hands.

Is the warmth you carry a quiet fire?
 Does it burn with longing, not with desire?