Touch

For some reason, I have been thinking a lot about touch, and how necessary it is. It is a less tangible need than say the need for food and water, shelter, or warmth, but it is no less essential. When you think about it, we seek out human contact all the time, whether in healthy or unhealthy ways. Some of the better contacts, hugging friends, making love, cradling babies, holding hands, playing with someone's hair, tickling. And then there are the middle of the road contacts, bumping and grinding at a dance club, standing nearer someone on the subway than is really necessary or comfortable for the other person. And finally, scary contacts, forced sex, abuse, sex for money. People are so desperate for human contact, they are willing to degrade others, and be degraded for it.

Most people find healthy ways to fill the need, they turn to family and friends for hugs and comfort, to significant others to be held, to children they care for to hold. It becomes dangerous when people aren't taught how to fill their touch quota, and then turn to sad and scary ways of compensating.

I don't say this to evoke dark or depressing thoughts, but just as a note of something that has been on my mind a lot recently. This is partly because I have been feeling deficient in human contact and rather alone of late. I am not in a relationship, so no one is holding me in a loving embrace, most of my friends are far away, so I am receiving fewer hugs than I would prefer, my dad lives locally, but other than that, my family is far away, so I have no sisters or mom to rub my head and play with my hair, no one to lay with on the couch. It is one of those things that can easily get away from you until something happens to open your eyes to it. You don't always notice why you are feeling alone and solitary, separated from the communal human existence. If someone were to just come up to me right now and hug me, I would probably struggle to hold back tears of loneliness.

The eye opener for me happened the other day while I was watching a few of my favorite babies, Sean and Amanda's two little girls, A and B (not to be confused with model "A" and model "B", but rather as the first initial of their names- who knows though, perhaps Sean and Amanda planned it that way so that when the girls are running around the house like crazy people someday, and the inevitable forgetting of their childrens' names occurs, they can just shout out "Model A! Would you please stop chasing your sister with that glob of mud in your hand!").

Anyway, we were laughing and having a good time, dancing to the radio, building forts, spinning in chairs, you know, all those good things toddlers like to do. At one point I was holding their younger daughter who is about 1.5 years old, and out of nowhere, she put her little mouth up against my cheek in an open mouth, slobber all over your face kiss, and then rested her little head on my shoulder and just stayed there for a few seconds before looking up at me smiling and then crawling back toward the mess of couch pillows and blankets that had at one time been a fort. I think tears may have actually come to my eyes in that moment. I don't know if she sensed it in a way that only small children can, just how much I needed that touch, but I left the house as dusk was settling in, with my soul a little bit restored.