Untouchable

The sudden absence of human touch, a connection severed the first time by my mother, a pandemic the second.

Phantom-like, the pain inhabits the background of my mind, a dull pulse, lightening-ed with shoots of pain. Red raw, sharp, agonising.

Covid-19’s socially distant world hacks at me, slamming the pieces back decades, bashing into my mother with her vacant gaze, to arrive at the original injury.

In my child’s mind, there was no slow withering that I could see, or perhaps, busy surviving, I never noticed it. One day there was a limp hug, a lop-sided kiss on one cheek, then the next just nothing as I stood by my mother’s chair, waiting to say goodnight. Eyes down as though I wasn’t there, she knitted something in pink, A Country Practice flickered, staticky, and I stood, wilted, as she ignored me, even as I kicked gently at her chair.

Long used to her shortish intermittent periods of pretending I did not exist, I waited for her silent storm to pass, but it didn’t.

Monday or Saturday, sunny or cloudy, it didn’t matter, she touched me only when necessary, otherwise sidestepping me as though I was a wall, as I leaned so close into her that her body had to touch mine as she pushed past. Day after night after day.

I learnt that hugs were for family photographs.

Hollow, my insides tingled, craving. My skin seemed colder.

Gradually, my arms stopped opening in anticipation of a hug, no longer hoping. Treated like I was untouchable by my mother, my mind split apart: I wasn’t worth touching, obviously, but only to women. My father’s hands roamed my body, and the schoolyard bullies, mostly boys, shoved and hit and kicked at it.

The type of touch I craved, I couldn’t get, the ones I didn’t want, I could.

I didn’t know what to do with all that.

Never given a reason for her withdrawal, I wondered often, why she wouldn’t touch me:

What did I do wrong? Can I undo it? Will she ever hug me again?

Never given an answer, I obsessed on it.

To a child, some things can only be ‘fixed’ by a hug, limp or not.

I became ghostlike, my need for female touch sometimes outweighing my distrust of people. Women with long hair had it silently combed through my fingers. And sneaking up behind any female who extended the smallest hint of kindness, I pinched an edge of shirt, dress, skirt, rubbing it between finger and thumb as I trotted beside or hid behind, whoever it happened to be.

Sometimes, braver, I drifted to the front, where I stood, avoiding eye contact and ignoring requests to move as I fiddled with buttons on dresses and blouses, oblivious to which bits I should or shouldn’t touch.

Eventually I withdrew, out of reach of their shoving hands.

Where, a metre or so away, I stared silently, blank faced.

They could bat away my hands, but it was difficult for them to stop my voyeuristic eyes, as I took it all in: mothers hugging children at the school gates, classmates’ arms around each other after a game, friends’ hands squeezed at the scary part of the movie - something I imitated covertly two chairs away, gently stroking my own hand.

As my heart twisted and spasmed.

I knew I was rejected. It wasn’t that women could not touch me. They did not want to.

I was different. Dirty. Unlovable.

It was a cruel form of social distancing.

Even as a child I understood this.

Over time, I forgot and didn’t forget what a female’s hug felt like.

Instead, my body became used to men’s hands, as I flinched away uselessly.

Touch now made my skin crawl.

Eventually, I disengaged, telling myself that I didn’t want to be touched. Not any touch – good, bad or indifferent.

Not from anyone.

By 21, ambivalent, unless I initiated touch, I’d pull back if someone else did. It was too intense, my hungry skin raw, nerve ends afire. Worse, at times my mind superimposed his touch over the touch of others, so that I struggled to separate the two, sometimes ducking away, as though evading a fist. I avoided hugs, cringed at kisses.

Decades on, I still hate to be kissed. And the touch of another, still burns. At times.

However, gradually, over years, my longing for touch crept back. Isolated, I didn’t get touched much, so I came to CRAVE hugs, pats on the back, and gentle hands in mine. I loved it all, as long as I was never held too tight, needing to feel I could escape.

But, then came Covid-19 in 2020,

it’s virus ridden tentacles suddenly jerking away *all* those hugs and pats and gentle hands in mine.

And, unlike decades before, I soon found that a pandemic’s touchless world is complete.

This time, not even the roaming hands of a man.

In Covid’s world, touch is for people who ‘forget’ social distancing or who live together.

Reminded of standing beside my mother’s chair, I can no longer ‘forget’, and I live alone.

2022. Now three years into this touchless world, as we move into post-covid ‘normal’,

I have re-walked the journey of that rejected child – confusion, a blank indifference, a dull despairing longing which moves to barely contained tears, fear which moves to barely controlled aggression.

Shaped by that little girl, as people increasingly do away with social distancing, their bodies too close to mine, hands reaching to shake my own as they ignore my ‘no’, just as my father did, my mind has split.

Just. Like. Before.

But with a twist.

Triggered, I cringe at the feel of another’s skin, our germy hands as damaging to each other as his groping hands on my childish body.

For the second time in my life, touch is dangerous, but this time, not just for me.

For the second time in my life, I do not want to be touched.

For the first time, I do not want to touch.

Yet.

Yet. Remembering the pain of watching others hug as a child, I notice that this time, as families embrace, I turn my eyes away.

Originally written Dec, 2020; revised 2022