Handprints on my heart.

The song playing was The Kills - Last Goodbye. Sad and sentimental as it gets.

I am getting our house painted so we can rent it out. I came, I planned and then I executed. Most walls were being painted by handymen but there was a small spot near the stairs that I thought of tackling myself. A little touchup was required. 

All seemed good till I came across a few handprints. Tiny handprints, hard to see on the wall, way down there. Little Ashvin's one and half year old hand prints. 

The world stopped still for a while. I could not get myself to paint over them. I had cried my eyes out when we sold our first car. Cried some more when we moved from our first house. It got better and by the third car I had stopped the wailing. It did not hurt all that much when we left this house but this little handprint bought back more memories than I could deal with with dry eyes.

 Ankit had bought home this poem from school once:

Very faint and very little.

Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls.
I’ll be grown some day
And all those tiny handprints
Will surely fade away.
So here’s a little handprint
Just so you can recall
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small.

It had twisted my heart then and then again today.

The idealist me would have left the handprints on the wall. The practical me took a photo, wrote down this post and will paint over it. This time I will make sure Foster the People's Pumped up Kicks is playing loud enough.