Contact/ Needy Whores

During sophomore spring exams, I received a free 15-minute massage from my college’s health services. Being touched for those 15 minutes remains the longest contact with a human being I hold in memory. I never received her name.

I’ve read that a human being’s only two instincts are to cry and to suckle. We begin as parasites and then our only two compulsions are to demand attention and to quaff body fluids. Basically, we are born needy whores, screaming for warm boob in our mouths, arms cradling our bodies, and hands wiping shit off our butts.

Then we regulate, learning to do for ourselves. And we learn to do for ourselves and then regulate.

We learn how to hold a bottle, to walk, to control our bowels. Crying becomes a herald for punishment, for a scathing word and a hot hand instead of a soothing in gentle arms. Because you know better. Your emotional discernment has matured past such demonstration. But your instincts haven’t matured. Regulated, they carrying on through asphyxiation.

Perhaps that is why I cannot always remember faces or voices, but I can instantly feel against me the body of every person I’ve ever hugged. Faces and voices require moments to construct with the wariness of fiction’s brush adding a curve to a cheek or a tilt to a laugh. But hugs, so immediate and so tangible that fiction has no time to uncap its pen, envelop me instantly.

I feel their hug. I feel myself in their hug, against my chest, my stomach, my cheek, my shoulders, inside my arms. I feel their warmth, their closeness. Their hair, skin, bones, muscles beneath skin. Palm against back. Chin against collarbone. Breath against fabric. Beating chest against beating chest. Sensations so exact I could peel away their epidermis and still know them by holding their anatomy to mine.

Sometimes I wish I were a dog so I could walk up to people and feel their hands all over my body.

Sometimes I wish I were a masseuse so I could touch people for an unbroken 15 minutes.

Sometimes I wish I were pregnant so I could always be holding someone.

Sometimes my chest feels like it will split open because even air would be more filling than this need for contact. I brace my arms around myself, fingers digging beneath shoulder blades, face buried into elbows.

Tighter.

Tighter.

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