“It’s the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” — Crash
I spent a recent weekend with a grieving friend and wounded her on at least two occasions; it was an inadvertent injury, but still painful for her. The damage was inevitable, the by-product of the soft collisions of human interactions.
I am inept at comforting, a coward before another’s misery. My hugs are clumsy; my words — if spoken at all — are hollow. I can offer my physical presence as a dam to the flow of the effluvium of misery. I can offer my industry: I will lift, haul and mow, mop and dust, feed the animals. I can cook. I can write something about a way-back machine that I hope will provide some solace, but I cannot bring a touch that warms, calms and soothes.
I am self-protective, wary of being too open, certain that openness will provide dangerous access to my most secret heart. I’ve lived in neutral, idling, with equally low expectations of joy and pain. Despair and delight were balanced on that neutral line. I embraced a philosophy that dictated that one couldn’t be greatly disappointed if one anticipates little emotional reward. I was terrified of the wild yawing of incredible joy, knowing that it led to inevitable despair. In my thinking, if I stayed close to the ground with my flights of delight, my fall into despair would be softened.
A long time ago, a family I met shared great warmth with me. I was startled by the welcoming hug of a stranger, an enfolding that created a womb-like feeling of inclusion, acceptance and safety. Unlike the fictional people in L.A everyone in that family touched everyone. A long time passed before I learned to tamp down the urge to shrink away from that intimate gesture of greeting: some events in my life had made me afraid to share myself. Only the smallest portion of my life had been written and I still had not seized authorship, not taken up the pen of my own fate. I questioned my worthiness to be included at the table, to partake of the feast.
I have moved past that first touch from that family and I am better. In private conversations with those who have gained access to my secret heart, I advocate for the sharing of that heart. My children and grandchildren get unbridled hugs. I have a good friend who greets me with a kiss, full on the mouth, and I accept the gift with an ever-growing grace. And I fumble with the odd hug when one good friend is mourning the loss of love and the other, the loss of the love of her life. I know that opening my arms to grapple with another person’s grief is an invitation to and an acceptance of the possibility to care and to wound; I can only hope that my caring is great enough to stanch the wound. In order to love, you must be willing to hurt; loving is the way to recover. But still — I crashed into my friend and wounded her, and for a bright hot moment I saw in her eyes all of the disappointments against which I had armored myself.
Then I remembered that the capacity to love can be strangled by the fear of those soft collisions, and I chose to risk again, the crash.