I am obsessed with people's hands, and for that matter people who talk with their hands. I talk with my hands and so does everyone in my family. If you watch us around a dinner table at meal-time, we are animated and verbose, communicating in words as much as we rely heavily on gesture and gesticulation.

I get caught up in observing people's hand gestures or just gestures in general when I'm talking to them, almost as much as I get caught up in words, and the words underneath the words. I like the way that certain gestures encapsulate who a person is - people reveal so much through a movement. I read somewhere that men are more finely attuned to body language than women; it's primal. Apparently it's how they pick up on whether we like them or not. All those weeks and months we spend second-guessing ourselves and doubting, and men seem to know how we feel in an instant - in the flash of an eye. So I don't necessarily buy this idea that women are more intuitive than men - I think we communicate in so many languages simultaneously, some that we are conscious of and others that we aren't.

I've at times fallen in love with a gesture, with the way a person walks, or touches their fingers to the table as they're talking, those still, empty moments where you know a person completely because of the way they are in the world. The way your unconscious does these calculations your conscious mind can't, the way it knows things that it just does. particularly when it comes to men. D.H. Lawrence has this quote (in case you haven't noticed, I'm obsessed with D.H. Lawrence, he writes women so well, and men for that matter, but he writes women so well), "How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression."

The first time I recognized this was in the 9th grade. It was the first day of high school and I was standing in the doorway of a biology lab before the bell rang. I was wearing a patchwork vest, and torn jeans. I was holding a map. A map to my new high school which was vast and overwhelming with all kinds of wings and houses named after Greek Gods - Ogden, Bella and former headmasters of the school I think? Folsom, Clark? Greenwich High School was designed by an architect who previously built prisons - this commision was apparently a novelty for him, but he chose not to be too experimental. And so there I was, my first day in an airless concrete maze, with a map in my hand, looking lost, blocking a doorway, and a boy attempting to leave the classroom, a boy I didn't know, placed his hands on my shoulders, moved me to the side gently, smiled sort of cheekily, and then left. It was a gesture that spoke volumes - it irritated me and caught me off guard - it was an invasion of my personal space at a time when those sorts of trangressions didn't happen between people of two genders - at least not between two people who didn't know each other - and on the first day of school. And yet there was a familiarity to it, an assumed intimacy. It was the gesture of an older person - it's the kind of thing that happens now, in bars. It happens once you're in college where everyone touches everyone to see what their reaction will be, but this was different because we were young and in Connecticut where no one touches anyone else and it was 1993, when high school students didn't have rainbow clubs and the like.

It was a transgression, a test - the smile confirmed that - and in the years since, I've found few expressions of male-ness that are so expressive and complete in their economy. In the gestural sense. Needless to say, this boy was my crush for the next four years. And I was madly in love with him because of a gesture. A gesture which went on to confirm and encapsulate who he was over the course of the next four years - confident and unassuming, transgressive and provocative - and ultimately, willing to push you aside to achieve his own means. A gesture that was perfectly timed to catch me off-guard in a moment of vulnerability - and the beauty of it was that it wasn't timed or schemed - it was completely spontaneous and fell from the sky like cigarette ash to take root in my memories in some way as a significant moment.

Three years ago I ran into him at the Guggenheim, walking through endless circles of whiteness. He was looking at a painting, a Kandinsky. I saw him from across the room and recognized him immediately. My hands started shaking. He had gained weight, lost some hair, but somewhere in the ten years that we hadn't seen each other, the manifestation of that expression of maleness had taken root, had completed itself. And he was exactly as I knew he was.

How did I know? How do we know? It's not a specific type of knowing. Like knowing the periodic table of elements or how many ounces in a pound, or that the capital of Bulgaria is Sofia. It's such an intuitive, amorphous, sensual sort of knowing, that engages both the promordial, biological part of you and something else, maybe your soul.

And you recognize it instantly, the way your mind processes a picture, takes an instant, a slice of time and sometimes knows the entire story behind it, like a photograph of an unhappy couple at a party. They're holding hands, and dressed up, but you know.

The photograph of Sonny and Cher on the plane is a perfect example. Of just one part. It was an American Airlines flight from Boston to Chicago and someone had left a vintage copy of Life magazine in the seat pocket in front of me. Seriously vintage, 1963. The kind of thing you find and then wonder if someone knew you were going to be on this flight and knew your seat number and placed it there for you to find it. I flipped to the back and there it was, a black and white photograph of Sonny and Cher in the pool of the first house they bought in Los Angeles.

A perfect snapshot, the kind of picture that tells the whole story. Or the part of it that you want to know, or tell, or invent, or believe. I don't always know the distinction between these things. In the picture, they are laughing, she is on his shoulders, arms out like wings. Neither of them is looking at the camera. Her hair is tangled and wet, her teeth are crooked. He looks as though he has been caught by surprise, as though it has just dawned on him that this pool, this home, this woman, this life is his own.“I didn’t like her at first,” he said about Cher. “I thought she was a stuck-up flip chick." They bought the house with the pool and cathedral ceilings after they recorded “I Got You Babe” and it went to No. 1 on the charts.

It happened so quickly and they were so young, they hadn't even decided on their own individual identities yet. They hadn't curated who they were, they weren't Sonny and Cher yet. In a sense they were, but in a sense they weren't. They quickly embodied the idea without fully inhabiting it. Like the space of time between buying a house and moving all your things into it.

It's clear that they don't know yet what direction their lives are going to unfold in and somehow, from this snapshot, you know that life will ruin them. Overfeed one part and starve another. Is this true? I don't know. I make up stories. But her arms outstretched in that way just makes you believe that she will spend her life reaching for things that won't be quite it. That all that reaching will deliver, but it won't be quite what she expected it to be. And it makes you feel bad for her because in the picture she is happy. And it makes you wonder if she was every happy like that ever again.

I once read an interview with Cher years later, after Sonny died, where she talked about how they could have met at any place, any time, even ten years before they had met or twenty years after, and they would have still been Sonny and Cher. This made me think too, about knowing, timelessness, psychic bonds that can't be broken, even if the relationship breaks, but maybe that's another blog post.

Look up the picture if you ever get a chance. Celebrities don't have that look of naivete and un-self-consciousness anymore, and maybe this is why this picture stuck in my memory. Actually, I kept the magazine and still turn to it occasionally. But I don't need to because it's imprinted in my mind and makes me wonder about the relationship between the gesture and time; a boy grabbing my shoulders on the first day of the 9th grade, Cher with her arms out like wings in a pool right when life was easy and fun. Both oddly precient, as all things are, as all things can be: a window into the entire story, with most of the rest missing.