What will hurt the world will be the lack of hands. All of the missing touch. I don’t want my daughter- a generation brought up upon distance- to watch the subconscious dance me and an old best friend will do upon hello because a hug would be the only thing that might tick the miles off. I don’t want her to be confused, wide eyed as she watches the way mine and my sisters hands follow patterns of cats cradles and Dutch braids and pinkie swears and fuck off ones too. I don’t want her to feel like her hands don’t belong to her.
What will cause the world injury is the sacrifices of feeling we will all give up to stay alive. I don’t want a world where nobody knows the intimacy of getting a bug out of a friend’s sun streaked hair, the close templed inspecting of the wildlife that crawls upon our skin. How are we supposed to give up the linking of arms on a dark and cold night? How do we give up the way it feels to have fingers over ribs, fingers mesmerised by the smooth skin of our backs? How do we trip and not have hands to pick us back up again? I don’t want us to miss out is all. On closeness. On sharing. On loving. I don’t want to miss out on the specific weight of people, how that doesn’t mean how they rest their bodies but more like where they put their souls and how they place their hearts. We are human and we need coaxing, we need stroking, we need skin on skin from the moment we come hurtling into this world. I want us to remember what it’s like to be enclosed in arms made of love, made of laughter, what dancing circles feel like, what “let me kiss it better” does to healing. But for now we will sneak in one last version of “hold me” because we don’t know if the next hug is the last. Because the longing of “I miss you” doesn’t feel sated until my face is in your neck. We press knees together in secret under the table, wince whilst we try to pretend an elbow bump is the same thing as a forehead kiss. What is the point of living if you can’t do it holding someone else? Is it better to die in love than live apart? It’s what we’ve always known- touch and only touch might save us from the heartbreaking horror of being by ourselves.