The Human Touch
Dear Me,
It is Day 1 gagillion and 8 of #pandemiclife and you are living alone for the first time in #cumulativelife. This is perhaps the #1 item on your fear factor list, and has been long before the isolation of COVID-19 made living on your own a necessary reality.
Why?
You’re not sure.
You’ve always lived with your best friends, or with actor friends who instantly feel like family. You love interacting with other humans — having someone to come home to who asks, “How was your day?” Someone who kindly listens as you rail on about the indignities of the subway, or the monitor at that dumb required ECC where they clearly weren’t looking for anyone so you shouldn’t have bothered curling your hair, or about how you got to hot yoga 1 minute past 5:00 and you got locked out so instead of breathing your frustration out through lion’s breath you got a Schmackary’s cookie and made totally unnecessary purchases at T.J. Maxx so that you felt you contributed something to society.
You miss saying all of that to a real live human-being in the very same room.
The instant gratification you feel from telling other New Yorkers how much you love to hate New York. The closeness that being in inescapable close proximity brings. The connection you feel even with the subletters who used to manscape with the kitchen scissors and leave them on the toilet before you discovered the evidence of such an ungodly act in abject horror.
Yep, you’d risk even the sight of foreign pubic hair all over again if it meant that you could just have consistent human contact each day.
You realize that it’s now been a month since you’ve physically touched another human being. Let alone since you’ve hugged someone. Being held. The very words make you want to cry. You feel silly saying it out loud, but you feel the phantom weight of that phrase, the terrible impossibility of running headlong at your very best friend and squeezing them until it hurts. Of Mom’s unrelenting embrace when she comes to pick you up at the airport at midnight. Of the hands that you grasped on either side of you eight times a week at the curtain calls that comprised your livelihood just 10 months ago. And that very thought is perhaps what hurts the most.
Do other people hurt like this? Are they wondering somewhere in their solitary beds what it will feel like to be held again? To have someone caress their cheek and comb through their hair with their soft and steady hands? Or do the people who share their beds with loved ones feel this way, too? Are we ever truly together? Or are we just now truly realizing what it means to be confined to the singular nature of our experiences and emotions? That our brains can never really process what another body feels? Will our assurance of “I know what you mean” ever really be true?
Dearest Me: I have to believe that the answer is “Yes.” That for maybe the first time in history, we are all learning what empathy really means on a deeply spiritual level. That although our pain is individually quite different and specific to our own peculiarities, we are collectively more unified than we’ve ever been in acknowledging that everybody hurts. That everyone craves connection. That everyone wants to be seen, heard, and loved. And felt. Held.
So for now, as excruciatingly difficult as it may seem, know that I am holding you. That I have your back, and that I will rub it with the utmost care. That I always have. And that there will be many, many more hugs to come, indeed perhaps the most meaningful embraces of your life once we can all joyfully and ecstatically celebrate the fact that we can hold one another close again in a way that we unwittingly took for granted before.
So for now, you keep doing you. Keep holding onto you. As best you can. For it’s what you and only you do best. You feel me?
Love, You
