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The afternoon rolls in, raining. I retreat into tea and blankets, velvet pillows and woolen socks.

We were supposed to have lunch today, but you never called. In my uncertainty, I hesitate to call you, so now I am here, alone, making lentil soup and singing to myself. It’s okay, but I would have liked to have seen you, to have rested for a moment in the warmth of your hug. That is perhaps the source of my loneliness here, just the absence of touch.

I remember when I first moved to the city, how stunned I was at the absence of touch. Within our group of friends were all so tactile, all hugs and cheek kisses and holding hands. The joke was that you had to start leaving the party ten minutes before you actually wanted to go, because it would take that long to make the rounds of hugs. We slept in the same beds, shared our straws and sandwiches, pressed our faces together when we embraced.

But out there, East coast and big city, nobody touched each other except to shake hands, and that sometimes seemed an aggressive act. I found my skin hardening, my body retreating into itself.

Now that I think of it, this might be another foundational reason that I don’t tend to stay long between romantic relationships. It is hard to find a group of friends who will fulfill all my need for physical touch, and a need it very much is. Without regular tactile contact with other people, I start to wither, and a boyfriend (or girlfriend, for that matter) is the easiest way to have someone with whom I can rub shoulders, hold hands, press skin to skin. It doesn’t have to be sexual; my favorite memories of you are when we are squashing our foreheads together and laughing. I revel in being naked with someone, just the sensual full-body sensation of it, just the feeling of touch extending down to my toes. My other favorite memory is that first moment – it happened every time – when we had pulled off the clothes and burrowed under the covers, frantically entwined our limbs then relaxed into each other, that first moment when all my skin is touching all of yours, and I take a deep breath and close my eyes, and when I exhale, I lose all worry and fear into the pure relief of your body. It isn’t sex, just contact.

It always felt like when you suddenly notice you’ve been accidentally holding your breath, and you let it out. Cells returning to life. Too long in between those moments, when our relationship was straining or now, when I am so far away, and it is as though I can feel my cells dying. I said to you once that your body is as an addiction to me, but I think maybe the greater addiction is to bodies, to physical beings, to touch.

So now I find myself leaning against near strangers in class, resting my head on the shoulders of casual friends, making love to him in the dawn of our first and final day together.

I wonder what Zen will tell me about this. That I should sit with my withering cells and my collapsing skin, I suppose, that I should just experience them as they are without judgment. As Hamlet (or, I suppose, Shakespeare) so aptly noted, There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. We assign value to what merely exists.

But it hurts! It hurts to be so long alone and isolated, without the healing touch of anyone, without any tenderness to soothe. It hurts in my actual body to go so long without that contact; it is a physical pain. And I don’t know how to sit with that, to accept it without trying to change it. To accept it at all: why not find the friends who will let me nuzzle up to them, why not just get another boyfriend? Or why not just buy myself a new vibrator and some silk pajamas, I suppose.

What do I do now, then? Sit with my lonesome, starving skin, let it seep through me. Pain isn’t bad, says Joko, it’s just something we don’t like. This dull, nagging ache is a tough one, though. I’m finding myself very resistant to the idea of giving it up.

There is pain that I can transmute, pain that I can relax into until it sings through my veins, almost sweetly. The right pain is a meditation unto itself, proof of body, proof of life, a bell that brings me back into myself.

But this is not that pain, and I don’t know what to do with it. However, I am willing to admit that the best course of action is not to throw myself into situations in which I can mitigate it, but I suppose to try and come to terms with it somehow. At least then, I can act knowledgably and mindfully, know what I am doing. So I suppose I should sit with it for a while, after all. Stupid Zen.

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