Touch Each Other
Our relationship to touch in this culture is nothing short of tragic.
We ALL need it. So much more than most of us get, especially if we are single and not parenting.
I notice the difference between days where I receive nourishing levels of touch and the days when I do not.
When I say nourishing levels of touch, I want you to understand the magnitude of what I mean.
For me, this is at least four hours in loving contact with other human bodies.
Four hours EACH DAY.
Sleeping with a partner doesn't even count, because we are not awake (also I can't sleep touching someone else, often choosing separate beds in cohabitation).
How, you might wonder, could anyone find themselves so abundant with touch?
There were times when we couldn't help it. Our work was handing things to other hands, bodies in relationships of platonic touch, getting shit done.
Now we gaze deeply at pixels. Now, many of us touch only machines.
In my modern life, partner dance has been integral in the times when I am not partnered. Hours upon hours in the arms of lovers of technique, music, movement, and me.
In this way I have stayed nourished, lush with touch in a way I can see impacting the starving populous around me. Dawning on them as unbelievable opulence.
One particularly poignant memory I have is coming back from Soulplay in 2019, in the San Jose airport.
I was radiating a touchable softness, and I watched men grapple with it. The poor dears, so many only know touch via that *one* channel.
I'd spent three days in an environment friendly to touch. I had been among strangers disposed to regard each other as future-friends.
I was a walking advertisement for the village to which we all yearn to return.
Three men were orbiting me in the airport, vying for my attention, and my boundaries were exquisite, village boundaries, "I know exactly what you're here for, when you think you're here for more."
I let my love wash over them; I didn't hand out my number.
On the plane, the man who sat next to me did not make eye contact, but remained in contact with my leg with his leg throughout the flight.
It wasn't flirtatious, it was the same way dogs in a kennel curl up together.
Our kennels feel more crowded when we all need our own "space."
This space is metaphorical and literal, the ways we resist overlapping. The ways we see overlap as burdening the other with our presence. The way overlapping leaves us vulnerable to the intentions they may project upon our presence or our desire for contact and connection.
At least, that's how it was in 2019.
It got much worse from there.
We spent three years drawing sharp borders among us, curling up in a kennel which felt smaller and smaller. We distanced ourselves from others' bodies, masked our most prominent social-signaling mechanism, and cultivated a fear of shared breaths.
This is a posture we took under threat, threats from so many angles, most of them idealogical. What will other people think? Others, fears, ideas, became our jailers.
Thus our starvation has become even more acute, landing many in a Catch-22 of desperation.
We resist neutral contact until we crave it, and then we MUST resist it, because it is polluted with a craving the other must share for that to feel clean.
We pathologize this starvation and our craving, when it is *perfectly normal for a nourished human to want HOURS of contact with other bodies.* This desire is innate, it is NOT a result of your desperation.
Your desperation is a whole other thing.
To put this in practical terms, you would need three meals every day, even if you'd always been getting them. But you wouldn't constantly be panicking about where the next one comes from, daydreaming about food to the exclusion of all else, asking everyone you meet for food with a crazed desperation, or determinedly NOT asking ANYONE you meet for food, in case they learn the shameful extent of your starvation. In case they feel a compulsion to feed your starvation, rather than a true desire to have a meal with YOU.
When my roommate moved in, I asked that she be in her enormity, and that we come together to collaborate, should we find our enormities rubbing together in any sort of unpleasant friction.
So far the friction of our overlap has been DELICIOUS. Like most of the friction in my life, it's a source of pleasure and nourishment. It doesn't hurt, why should it hurt?
In our town, it's perfectly normal to watch humans remain in embrace for minutes, the hugs turning into holdings. It's not that weird to sit your leg against a stranger, to take a drag of their smoke, to hug upon the first meeting. It's par for the course to exchange compliments and praise, to notice delightful things and call them to each others' attention, to steer someone else's kid out of danger.
This community, too, has had to heal from the years of the touch-taboo, but they've made it a priority.
We sprawl out into each other's lives, over each other's bodies, and this kennel starts to feel like a spacious home once again.
It was culture shock, over Thanksgiving, to be in places where this is not the norm, for me and for them. My presence rippled through Brooklyn like a tectonic shockwave, so massive you can't feel it, while everything changes.
I showed up there touchably soft, having real interactions, and I watched the memories dawn on battle-scarred faces. Memories of connected community.
We are stuck here together, us on this planet, we of this society, you and those with whom you share your home.
Can we make it all feel really, really good?
Can we live like every way we are is worthy of celebration?
Can we respect our natural hungers?
Can we come together and remain distinct?
Can we see each other and our encroachments as assets, resources, nourishment?
These are the questions that bring wealth to the village.
