I never thought I would miss having more body at my disposal, but I hate how this new(ish) single life I'm living feels like a loss of mass, like I'm missing part of me all day, every day. I don't mean just metaphorically, either.
I remember, early on in my relationship being solidly long-term, marveling at the feeling of knowing another body so intimately that it was almost an extension of my own – I could touch it and interact with it almost as freely as I could my own, and that freedom came without the chains of disgust in which my own body was wrapped.
Similarly, I found I loved 'belonging' bodily to someone else. Once I became less twitchy about him randomly touching parts of my body I usually preferred to 'pose' in preparation, like my stomach, I was filled with happiness at the thought that he might just reach under the dinner table and lay a hand on my leg, or slide a hand across my lower back while we moved through a crowd.
The idea of someone touching me, and I him, without even thinking about it, that fluidity and intimacy, is something I miss way more than the sex, and even more than the emotional and intellectual connection (it might help that the emotional support was severely lacking in the last year of our relationship). I went to Mexico last month with my brother and his girlfriend of ten years, and as I sat across the aisle from them before takeoff and watched her lean into him, his hand curving just inside her lower thigh, I could feel my loneliness in every inch of my skin. Needless to say, that trip brought up a lot of miserable feelings I'd been ignoring pretty successfully.
As I said to my therapist when I got back from Mexico, the weekend reinforced with a vengeance my feeling of being completely and utterly alone: the only person in my immediate family without a smaller, more 'immediate family' within; a new 'single lady' who doesn't know how to navigate this foreign landscape; a roommate instead of a live-in partner for the first time since college. But even more than that, it emphasized my ache for touch.
Sure, I can be touched in other ways – I can go out and have a one night stand, or date someone for a while and get a bit of hand holding in, or go and get a massage from a lovely, slight man with powerful forearms (marry me, Esteban?), but it isn't the same. Without the intimacy, without the years of touching and being touched, without the innate knowledge of another's body and the consistent sense of belonging to each other, it will be surface touch. Empty, like so much of my life right now. Unfulfilling, temporary, a quick fix that fixes nothing at all.
So for now I'm just living with it, trying to understand and accept this naked chill running from my skin deep into my bones, and doing my best to believe that someday I'll feel that warmth again.
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