Disclaimer: Wrote this in ten minutes at midnight in the dark, soooo....y'know. The rest is self-explanatory....or not. Take as you will, and hope you enjoy :)
Like the Back of His Hands
He looks at his hands and sees his life etched in lines in his calloused skin, spreading over his palms and fingers, his joints and nails. He looks at his hands, and with eyes that have dulled, he sees the lost loves, the lost smiles, the lost time. Too much lost time. Within those calloused, life-beaten palms he can envision his own wasted existence at his leisure, in full detail as if he were reliving it. They've experienced it all: turned thousands of graying pages in old, venerated books, brought countless drinks to parched and aching lips, pressed dew-dropped morning between newly-woken fingers, smoothed the grass, reached towards the sky. They've held an enraged wand as it turned fire and ice and the world on unwitting victims, tasted power and control and despair in the wake of victory or defeat. And they've become weapons themselves, experienced the crush and mince of bones, the near unbearable cracking of surrender against a cruel and distant mistress donned in tantalizing silver. But all of this these veteran hands could handle. The memories of a full but pointless life etched like stone in the weathered skin, like cities on a roadmap.
But there are some lines that stretch deeper below the surface, cut into the epidermis, coil the blood, bore down to his very soul. He reads these imprints with trepidation, attempts to skip over them and onto other, more manageable markings. But in the end, as he peruses his hands, he finds their call unavoidable, their marks to deep and scathing and real. In these lines, he can feel again the softness and purity of young, unspoiled faces, the way a mischievous smile curves against his palm, the sweet gentleness of eyelashes and lips and tongues as they penetrate into orifices and indents with innocence or something more. He can relive the warmth of the bed, the heat of ecstatic love as it falls like beautiful pain against his unworthy skin...
His palms close into tight, closed fists as he tries to block out these memories, to cover up these marks that force him to relive the sparks of his dull, failed existence over and over in unbearable monotony. Perhaps he cries; perhaps he doesn't. Regardless, when he opens his jaded and world-weary eyes, he'll realize again for another countless time that the back of his hand is covered in scars.