I’m driving home from Minneapolis, returning from visiting an old friend. It’s been six hours on the road. One hand is on the arm rest because my shoulders hurt from being still for so long. I look down at the other hand, the one on the wheel, and wonder how it ever got to be this size. 

I remember watching my mom’s hands as they moved across a keyboard, as they carefully chopped lettuce for salad, as they braided my hair in the bathroom mirror, wondering at how much bigger they were than my own. When you’re young, the whole world seems bigger than it does when you’re old. Furniture is more spacious, servings of food more generous, and every hour of the day holds possibility for so much more than just 60 minutes. My mother’s hands were never that large, but, lacking adult perspective, they looked bigger than I ever thought my own would grow to be. 

At 23 I own a guitar made for children because my fingers are short and stubby. Still, I can’t play a B chord properly. Something about a barre chord I dont think I’ll ever be able to master. Maybe my joints are just too stiff, but when I describe the problem to my friends I always attribute it to the size of my hands.

“My fingers are just too short. I’ll transpose any song to infinity before I can play an F the way you’re supposed to play an F.” 

I’m bigger than I ever thought I’d be. I'm growing but I am not grown. In 20 years I’ll look down at my hands and they will be the same size they are today but I will understand how I’m fundamentally different than I was.

Driving home from Minneapolis, it strikes me that I trust myself alone on a six hour hour drive. It strikes me that I drove six hours to see my adult friend in their adult apartment, that I’m driving another six hours back to my own apartment. That I like a glass of wine at the end of the week, but still not enough that I feel like I’m losing control. I smoke cigarettes but I’m trying to quit. I’m trying to figure out what I’ll do after graduation. I’m looking into paid internships for the fall. As big as my life looks now, it would look even bigger to any version of my younger selves.

As I get closer and closer to the city and the traffic starts to slow, I can’t stop looking at my hands. Maybe I’m nearing some novel epiphany. Maybe I’m just exhausted. Either way, I know that if I were to press my palms into my mother’s at this very moment, my fingers would stick out past hers. I would notice my bitten hangnails first, then her wrinkles. Maybe I just miss my mom. Maybe I’m developing a new perspective.