The motorcycle idles at the red light; a young man balances the huge machine upright by leaning on his left foot, which is planted firmly on the road beside the bike. He isn’t wearing a helmet as he should, but sports a knitted cap, brimless and purple. He’s leaning forward slightly, as if the bike is just a smidge too big, his weight on the handlebar grips. His still body is the buzz of anticipated movement. He is focused forward and waiting.
Behind him, also on the bike seat — a slight exhale from touching him — sits a girl. Her feet balance on the footholds on either side of the bike. She, for the moment, sits effortlessly, her muscles at ease, shoulders drooped, singularly keeping her own balance. She’s waiting, too.
The light blinks green. The boy revs the bike motor and is suddenly moving much faster than any car leaving the same crosswalk white line.
The jolt of momentum causes the girl to fall backward slightly, but she knows this is coming. As the motorcycle gains speed, she leans forward, places her hands and forearms firmly around the boy’s rib cage, tucks her head behind his neck, and rides with the kind of balance you lean into — she is anchored.
It was, especially in terms of giving someone a ride on a motorcycle, the simplest of touching.
But, it got me thinking about touch and how touch feels good.
“Duh,” you say. Or, if your vocabulary is better than mine, you say “indubitably.”
And, then it got me thinking that we aren’t so good at talking about touch, giving touch or valuing touch. In fact, we’ve become salaciously voyeuristic about touch in this culture.
And, at what cost? What do we lose when we devalue and oversexualize the human need for touch?
We all go through hard spells of bleak gray, and soundless or hollowing pain. When we see such phases of our lives for what they are, catch a momentary reflection of our own isolation, our throats tighten to a sliver with barely room for air. We shudder. Adrenaline, or bile, or both, burn in our gut and we try not to feel, or cry, or waver. We can go untouched for days.
Then someone — at the store, in a cafe, at church — holds our elbow, pats our hand, presses a palm to our back. And we break some small bit; our facade cracks. They save us, these small touches.
Even the briefest touch can anchor and remind us that blood and soul slices through all people, even if sometimes that very touch slices us up with memory of loss or ache. Anchoring touch is vital. In another day and age it came more frequently, in the smallest of gestures, often between strangers. People are made to touch each other. We are not, yet, robots.
Isolation has always been a part of the human experience. But we are more isolated from each other now than we ever have been before. Our means of communicating with others frequently involve typing words and clicking “send,” and wireless connections that remove us from real human contact.
Some people love this new, cold kind of world. They love what they see as the freedom; they want to escape the awkwardness of contact. They want to hang onto the snarkiness they are allowed when they think no one can touch them.
But for others this isolation is a rock-loud thud they did not ask for. For some it is a death, or the void of forced absence, or a less visible — but just as unimaginable — loss. It leaves deep alone.
It’s nearing Valentine’s Day. With it, and for many weeks, come the advertised and stylized versions of love and affection that we are told to desire. All the while we aren’t touching each other.
When’s the last time you shook hands? Patted a back? Helped someone through a door? Really? Well, good. Perhaps there’s hope for us after all.
Happy Valentine’s Day. I’d touch your hand if you were here.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
