Touch

In the film Life as a House, Kevin Cline sits in a hospital bed recovering from a cancer that hasn’t revealed itself yet. No one is at his bedside. He’s divorced and his only child, a teenage Hayden Christenson, wants nothing to do with him. In silence, the nurse is feeling his head and cheeks for a fever and he utters, eyes closed: 

“I haven’t been touched in years.” 

I think about the longing in this confession, as if his touch starvation is a form of malnourishment. 

The nurse touches his face softly, until he tries to touch back. 

In Europe during the Middle Ages, they were collective communities; they shared utensils, they shared seats, they shared beds. Touch was so common, it never felt strange. It never felt forced. It never felt missing. 

Mothers were unafraid to touch their children; men caressed the faces of their wives. They consumed each other through touch; confirmed their livelihood with every caress, reaffirming there were others around them that burned for belonging, too. They weren’t alone in their vulnerabilities. 

***

The most sought-after level of touch was religious. If someone could clasp hands with a man of the cloth, it brought them that much closer to God. They assumed they would be blessed from life’s misgivings. Finding religious relics to run their hands over was the next best thing if they were too poor to travel to a priest. When you were dying of something you couldn’t afford to diagnose, the investment of faith in touching a dead priest’s robes was the small hope that held you until the next sunrise.  

***

The Black Death turned Europe into a hands-off society almost overnight. When the plague began taking lives, the physical connection of humans was irrevocably severed. Upper class individuals didn’t go anywhere without gloves, helping distinguish them from people of lower classes. No one shared meals anymore; no one shared beds. They moved into an era in which people feared touching each other. The message in their eyes: 

What do your fingers carry? What is your mouth hiding?

The act of touch became a private affair. 

What if you had no one to touch you? 

Victorian women in the 18th century were told that masturbation was self-harm; a pollution of the body. They were told that masturbation would result in developing ulcers, tumors, displacement of the female organs, even cancer. They were told that vaginas were an object of general disgust, scaring women away from being interested in discovering their own bodies. They were told they must bathe in cold water to prevent any urge to explore. They were shamed for any expression of sexual desire or preference. 

Vibrators were invented to relieve their ‘hysteria’, not because they just wanted to be touched; just wanted to have someone acknowledge their unfulfilled needs. It was difficult finding a doctor willing to assuage their tension, even for a fee. Men didn’t know, or didn’t care, about the desires that lived in their women, a hunger always left on simmer. 

People in this century are still reluctant to touch. Public displays of affection are considered inappropriate in Ireland. Touching in India can be a punishable offense. Children can develop stunted emotional growth if not enveloped in a parent’s arms throughout childhood. 

We live behind monitors and in front of phones and broadcast through satellite signals. We can go days without seeing another human being, and longer without touching one. Someone standing too close in line at the grocery store is cause for concern.

But our nervous system transmits messages that a primal need is not being met. The receptors in our skin have been neglected. The denial for oxytocin and serotonin reaches a frenzy of uncontrollable impulses.

We’ve become bundles of live wires without an outlet. 

Intimacy and empathy are an emotional exchange made through touch. 

Being touched in grief is unforgettable— someone clinging to your shoulders tight in solidarity, trying to keep your body and your soul intact, although it feels like they’re rupturing through your pores and this human being’s hands on your skin is the only thing keeping your atoms fused together. 

You know the salve for when a partner has broken you? A mother’s hands.

A starvation:

It’s not a hunger of the gut but of the eyes. A desperation almost— to solve a mystery and sate a hunger at the same time. To discover how someone reacts when you kiss your lips to their beating neck, or if they ease their arms around you when embraced. You want to remember how their fingers feel laced with yours. To remember the 

way someone runs their fingers through your hair like your body was born for worship. 

A nourishment spoken in bodies. 

You’ve been gone for four months now. I don’t remember what country you’re in. 

Is that why you volunteer for deployments? To make my hunger for you ravenous? 

 I just want to be touched by someone, if not by you. I stand too close to people I know in the off chance they’ll brush against my arms. I hug my mother more. I pay a stranger to touch me. 

When you get home, you touch me so much and then, after some time, not at all. 

Nicole McCarthy is an experimental writer and artist based outside of Seattle. Her work has appeared in Hobart, The Offing, Redivider, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, the 2018 Best American Experimental Writing anthology, and others. Her work has also been performed and encountered as projection installation pieces throughout the Puget Sound and her written work can be found at nicolemccarthypoet.com. She is an Artist Trust GAP award recipient. Her first book, a hybrid collection about memory, is forthcoming in 2022.