Ode to Touch

Life is harsh to the one who consents to be touched by it. Most withdraw early, erecting high, polished walls of indifference - I do not condemn them; their fortress serves them well. Yet what they gain in safety, they surrender in all else. Only later, when the mirror no longer flatters, does the fierce hunger begin to loosen its jaws. Then insight comes - not as reward, but as a new severity - and the world, long held at bay, presses inward through every sense. How strange it is then, how almost unendurable, to remember the arms of one already gone, how my mother held me those few seconds longer, as though she were already practicing departure. Even the mornings, once ordinary and indifferent, arrive now with a terrible clarity - light scattered like broken glass across the threshold, cold, silver, singing with a violence that opens the eyes by force. Everything is changed. Everything is awake. And when I turn from the window back into this body, I feel again the mouths of girls that once opened softly against mine, and the firm, wordless hands of friends - brief covenants that say: You are here. I am here. For now. For this, perhaps, is the whole of our human task - to touch and to allow ourselves to be touched, though it burns. The most sensitive know this better than any other, and so they draw back, terrified of exposure, as animals retreat before fire. But I - I have tried the walls and found them unbearable. Therefore I remain open, stupid, trembling, without defence, like a creature that has forgotten how to hide. And in this lost, unmerciful world, I love you all.

CuldeSac

What are words without understanding and what is understanding without sense?

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