junkie.
I used to run my hands over pages
of magazines with pictures I liked, as if I could feel the cloth, the grass, the
old wood furniture, whatever glossy image caught my eye. I still do, once in a
while.
To feel my way around a person’s
skin is a pleasure; it is also a quipu of tingle and caress and warmth and how
they combine, in one sensitive moment, to encode in my fingertips a single,
small memory of the person in the skin.
When I touch in this way, I travel. My
mind quiets, the inner censor is soothed to sleep, and all that is left is
feeling and movement. It could be a dance. I could be only an accidental person,
temporarily suspended in sensation. It is something I long for, to touch in this
way, to be touched in this way, as if I were only a cup, thrown into an ocean,
filled with water, surrounded by
water.
Tonight I had a toffee chocishake
at Max Brenner. It is a confection of dark chocolate and cinnamon, served in a
curvy tulip glass, and it is a shock of rich and cold, thick and fluid. I also
had a taste of my friend’s Mexican spicy chocolate, hot with a kiss of chili,
and had to close my eyes. We use this word, feel, so casually. I feel good, I
feel warm, I feel like a cigarette, and yet, to feel, to recognize, I feel: it
is the possibly the most precious thing we have, the beginning of the soul, the
simplest strongest declaration of desire.