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When he touched her, he didn't want to touch her,
but he wanted to so he did. It was usually awkward and usually backrubs at
first. You touch someone and you are making them a promise, but he didn't know
what he was promising and all he wanted was to know he could touch someone
without promising. Because when you don't know what you are promising and you
try to keep your word you don't know what you are doing. He didn't know what he
was doing when he touched her back. The first one was awkward and disappointing,
poking and quick glides of the hands over shoulder blades, avoid the bra strap,
stay over the shirt, don't make any promises you don't know how to keep.
Give her a bad back rub, but do not let her know the feeling of her shoulders on
your fingers or the movement your hands make as they move from ribs to
spine. Make it medical. Make it ironic. Make it detached and unreal.
He was only good at back rubs when he was drunk.
When he was drunk he didn't care about the promises anymore, he just touched and
let it in through his fingers and her back felt alright for 24 hours. He even
liked the movements his hands made then. But he would stop, thinking he knew he
could not make the promise, and she would ask for him not to stop, please. And
he would start again, and not stop until he was sober.
He can't talk about touching because
there is always something wrong with the way people touch people. When you
find out they did not ever really want the promise, you back off, because you
don't know what to do except figure out the promise badly. When you find out
they are expecting you to keep your promises, you back off, because you know you
will not be able to figure out the promise.
We don't touch on the subway on the train in the
taxi in the car in the diner in the coffee shop. You cannot tell people you want
to touch them. And you can not ask them to touch you. You can't be touched
because you want the same promise, but you do not know what the promise is. It's
not love. He could love plenty of people he never touches. It's something else.
It is something that is frightening for everything it says about the people who
do touch. It is to be swallowed whole into the solitude of everything you touch.
"Here is my loneliness, I am giving it to you, take it, next time your hands are
on my back and you are finding a knot, and take us all out of monkeys and pandas
and say that we are something more real than evolution has made us, say that we
are something higher, that our solitude is here for a reason, that our
parents are not the only ones to be us so completely that we are made of them
and inside of them. When you put your fingers on the arch of my spine and move
it to the shoulder blade and do that twirl you do, with your palm, promise that
I will not die like this, in this state I am in, in this house in this job
driving nowhere every night and producing nothing I can point to and
declare of value with certainty, with complete certainty, tell me, with
your hands moving from the shoulder blades to the shoulders themselves and
pressing lightly on my neck, tell me that the way I have been has been okay and
that I can keep doing it and you will always find it valuable every day no
matter what?"
He can't. He can't tell it to anyone but he wants
to say it to everyone and so when most people would go from the hands on the
back to the lips on the neck he does not, when the body is smooth he does not
want to be perfect with his hands, he wants to give them up. And so
the boy has never fucked in his life. He can only touch the people who he
believes can make the promise to him, and so touching then is something else,
something unnameable.
But he has lost his faith in his own promises,
and so he does not touch her. He does not touch
anyone. It's no different, really.
-e.
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