Glass Muscle

I had to write something down by hand at the meeting.

All I could find was a pencil, small and yellowed,

the eraser worn flat from a childhood that wasn't mine.

My fingers closed around it and didn't know

what to do. Six months of typing has made

my hands forget how to hold this shape.

How much pressure to use. How to commit

to a mark that won't delete.

The graphite broke. I pressed too hard,

and again, and my handwriting came out wrong—

letters too big, too loose, the slant

unfamiliar even to me. Like my hands

were trying to translate a language

they'd learned and then forgotten.

The pencil got smaller. My writing got worse.

Shaky, uncertain. The letters losing

their confidence the way my hands have lost

their confidence in anything that isn't glass,

anything that isn't reversible.

I finished what I needed to write.

My handwriting was illegible.

I set the pencil down—half its length

already sharpened away—and reached

for my phone instead.

My hands remembered that shape.

They remembered how to move

across glass like it was water,

like it would never ask them to commit

to one word before moving on.