142 - paws, sorry
i've become startlingly aware of the asymmetry of my own hands recently.
each of my fingers is a different shape, bent inwards at a different angle. the innermost are pudgy, the knuckles kind of obtuse from injuries when i was a kid. they're both twisted, rotated inwards at about a 45 degree angle, refusing to lay flat. the nails on those fingers grow in an odd shape, a little thicker than the rest, and my fingerprints are cracked and warped by burns and little scars i've collected.
none of my nails grow evenly, really. on both my ring fingers they point slightly inwards, not quite on the same axis as the finger itself. on my index, one edge of the nail travels lower down, sits further back on the finger than the other edge.
the rest of my fingers are almost skeletal. they fit together like little puzzle pieces, the knuckle of one deforming the soft flesh of the next. when i hold my phone, the USB-C port rests in-between the second and third knuckles of my right pinkie, and there's no soft flesh left there at all anymore. the weight of it has left a perpetual pinkish indent instead.
i read somewhere that the human hand is a sort of embryonic coincidence. the number five is not encoded anywhere in your dna. there is no neat blueprint of an outstretched hand stored in your genetics, vitruvian style.
your hand starts off as a small, shapeless extrusion of cells. at some point there is a signal, and that signal tells those cells to seperate. in a sort of macro-scale mitosis they form discrete nubs, first into two and then four wiggly little bits. (and somehow the thumb emerges as well. i'm not really clear on that part).
the thing is, there's no instruction telling them specifically to stop there, at four (and a thumb). it just happens to be at this moment that your bones, tendons, skin start properly forming. bone to shape, tendon to move, skin to contain. they can't split any further, not without the whole thing going really messy.
if not for that little quirk of timing, we could easily have had two fingers, or eight. or maybe six? like i said, i'm not really sure how the thumb happens, or whether they all do this at the same time. i'm not a gestation expert, i just read this on the internet.
but it fascinates me. such an imprecise process for such a complicated part of the body.
i don't know why i've been fixated on this recently. i stim with my hands almost constantly, tracing the shapes of my own fingers and the edges of each nail and the ridges of my knuckles and the lines of all my tendons and every little imperfection i've gathered and the slight smoothness left by my engagement ring and the wrinkles on my palms and, really, anything that i can focus on instead of
everything else