Hands

My hands are always quite red. They look like they have been used for manual work, or washed in terpentine many times. There is some truth in that, but most of all my hands reflect something of who I am. I look at other people’s hands obsessively.

Today I saw a man in the Paris underground. The skin of his hands looked like fragile cracked paper. It was light brown. His fingernails where white and clean. His hands were folded on top of his bag. I could not resist staring at his hands; they where so beautiful.

Coat

I exited at Saint Philippe du Roule. I saw an old woman searching for something in a garbage bin. She was wearing a long coat decorated with illustrations of raindeer and something that looked like a golden thread. Her coat fascinated me and so I slowed down my pace to take a closer look at her. She was wearing red lipstick and her fingernails were painted red. Two scarfs were draped elegantly around her neck and she wore a small handknitted flower on a cord as a necklace. This woman was someone else one day; her clothes were the traces of her past.