You wanna talk about how you feel?
No.
Okay.  What do you wanna talk about?

She’s got an empty set tattooed on her hand
between thumb and forefinger on the left side, because she’s righthanded
So when she poured the ink from a Bic into a bottlecap
and dipped in a sewing needle
tip flame-bruised
It was her left hand flat on the plastic table
A zero with a slash through it -
In middle school this was how I wrote my zeroes
A handwriting quirk I tried out for two weeks
Until my math teacher gave me a D on a test
Marking every instance of 0 as if it were the empty set
I never did it again.

You wanna talk about how you feel today?
No.
Okay.  What do you wanna talk about?

Around her wrist - also on the left
in the same blurry ballpoint blue
It says
Vincit omnia veritas
Truth conquers all
Her hands never leave me
They were the first things I ever saw

You wanna talk about how you’re feeling?
Okay.

Sometimes I think that the hands belong to someone else
I’ve been watching them all my life and
They’re always the same
(the empty set)
But they’re not always attached to the same woman
It’s her eyes that change
They came into my life after her hands
And still I don’t quite trust them.

Staring is rude
Confrontational
So I learned to stare at the floor
or that spot in the air two feet in front of your nose
the place daydreamers go
the vanishing point.

Her voice would wash over me and I’d look at her hands
My mother’s hands
The pillars of the world, crowding every frame
The tale of my creation under them like the forging of a weapon
A tool, a toy
“I wanted a friend, so I made one.”
I imagine those hands selecting my traits one by one
Every strength, every virtue, every talent plucked
like hairs from her head
All my beauty borrowed
All my power loaned
All my successes predestined and expected
“That’s good, honey.  Do better.”
Like the moon, a white face in her shade
to reflect her light.

Should a tool aspire to be a toy?
Does a weapon wish it had been a teapot instead?
So few of us know what we are for
So few of us find a sense of meaning
One should be grateful to have one’s purpose
clearly dictated so early in life
And I am.
I have never doubted what I am made for
I have never for a moment wondered if I am an accident
Though I have long suspected I am a mistake.
Bidden, “Reflect!”
So bidden, I tried.
By her, the only god I ever knew
By her limitless light
I swear I tried.

The light never dims, not with distance
And not with time
This is how I know that her hands are still with me
Bookending my life
Brackets that make it a subset of her existence
What’s inside them?
(the empty set)
Not nothing, no
A specific nothing
Better than nothing, like a ham sandwich.
The empty set is the set of answers that are not answers
the tension between SHOULD and AM
the number of wishes you get.

But any emptiness makes music
and in the dark I’ve found
That the inside of me looks nothing like her.
There are more things in this hollow skull, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in her philosophy
When I shout, the brackets give back my voice
and every time it’s different
and we might have nothing but we have infinite nothing
An infinite resonating space
with infinite room for activities.
I’ve been thinking I might keep it empty
Just to hear the sound bounce
and over time, through echolocation
find out what this tool is really for.