The girl with no hands actually does have hands, it’s just – they are invisible and she only makes use of them to serve herself. No really, she can sew and play the piano – just not for you. Sometimes her lovers ask to have their egos stroked but the girl with no hands will not, and cannot indulge in such behavior.  Other times interested suitors will approach her at a bar downtown and ask for her number but the girl has no hands and so she waves them away with a toss of her nubby arm.  Does she ever wish she could feel? Of course, but sometimes it’s just easier to be felt. Once, in a meeting, a male partner tried to ask her to take notes and she just glared at him until he understood. The girl with no hands is unable to flip the bird so last week when she was cat called on the street she instead told the man to “fuck OFF” and this left the entire block silent and stunned. (She was smirking, though). Overnight, a whole class of paraphernalia becomes irrelevant: gloves, nail polish, secret handshakes, sweaty handjobs…She was the only girl in her fourth-grade class who could wear short shorts to school because technically her wrists grazed the end of her ass. Her favorite sport is American soccer and her favorite film is Cool Hand Luke. I saw her play classical piano out in Washington Square Park but the last time this happened, the New Yorkers couldn’t understand how she was making sound since her hands can’t be perceived. So, she doesn’t do that anymore. Though sometimes she will sigh when she remembers the solitary joys of combing a loved one’s hair while they watch in quiet shock. An invisible rake runs through their locks and all the while, a handless musician gently plays the world’s most tender harp using just her wrists.

The girl had a messy childhood. It was littered with loud noises and tons of shouting. Sometimes these were happy sounds: the scream of excitement tumbling down the staircase, or the jubilation waltzing through the front door. Other times, these would be displays of anger: hurled insults and words that crossed the rubicon and never looked back. It was in these moments when the girl would begin to clean. First, she’d wipe down all surfaces until she scrubbed away the last of the emotional debris. Then, her hand-held vacuum would zap away despair with a sharp inhale – anything could disappear at any second: dust bunnies, scraps of paper, the tornado that, at times, seized her with full force. She never felt like she had a handle on anything and for most of her young life, she was just a piece of sea kelp flailing inside a gale storm. She swore that as a grown-up, things would be different, and they are… and they’re not. These days, she has an Amazon subscription for weekly deliveries of Lysol wipes and bleach. For her birthday she asked for a $400 mop. She balks at the idea of hiring a house cleaner or splurging on a Rumba. “What are they going to do that I can’t do better?” And she’s not wrong, I suppose. I’ve seen the way she can eviscerate a red wine stain from a pair of white jeans, the way her eyes dart around the carpet, scanning for domestic tumbleweeds. She wants nothing more than to spend her Friday evenings on her hands and knees buffing the oak floors of her apartment. For this reason, her living space is cleaner than a sterilized echo chamber that’s never seen the light of day… it’s also why she doesn’t really have guests over… come to think of it, she doesn’t really have friends, it’s kind of impossible to be anything more than penpals with her. On a  Zoom call I mentioned that she didn’t have to pick up every single follicle of hair, sweep up each speck of dust within her reach, but she was too busy lint rolling the computer screen. Once she told me her wet dream was for a man to roll up his sleeves, and actually hand wash the dirty dishes. “That would be so hot,” she admitted with a wistful smile… then she was silent. We both knew she was thinking about how it would still be necessary for her to do a second wash, after the fact.

The girl who can’t stop daydreaming has already been hit by half a dozen cars and bicycles, and for this reason, she’s a pedestrian menace, especially in a city like New York. But don’t worry, miraculously, the girl has always recovered from these run ins. Last week she daydreamed about sushi in the shape of dogs. This week, she’s daydreaming about her latest crush: some long-haired earth specimen with locks as curly as a packet of ramen noodles. Given her multiple casualties, it’s truly a shock that she’s never actually bumped into anyone she knows on the street. Her gaze can only be compared to a sleepwalking butterfly. Her chin is always tilted up, she’s not looking at you. She’s staring at the sky and watching the lunchers, who sit at the rooftop restaurant like a pack of city pigeons. She’s thinking about how being inside the edifice feels like wading through the belly of a whale, how it already feels as though summer is slipping through her fingers though it’s only May. She daydreams about possibilities and make-believe scenarios, sometimes involving you but always involving her, and while she dreams about the day, the day in turn dreams about her: you can tell by the way she makes a wish on a dandelion and the seeds dance around her hair like a mortal halo. Her dream journal is more detailed and up to date than her checkbook and her ideal vacation destination is Saturn. She probably couldn’t recount for you any names from the street signs downtown, but she could be the sole author of the North American Cloud almanac. A disco ball can mesmerize her for hours, an optical illusion, for centuries. Behind her back, they call her an airhead, they say she’s a space cadet, and maybe they’re right – the left hemisphere of her brain replays her favorite dreams on a loop while the right side feels like swimming inside a lava lamp. Once she was daydreaming about what it’d be like to fly without paying attention, of course, and walked straight into a manhole. I haven’t been able to reach her ever since.