Learning to Touch
Written Summer 2003
“You’re not going to do it,” I told
Dragon.
Dragon is my best friend. She came down from Maryland
last week for the first such visit and the second time we had ever seen each
other face-to-face.
Dragon and I know each other from the Internet. Online,
Dragon is a very serious girl. She’s very thoughtful, and conversations with
her often lead to discussion, though similar opinions rule out debate.
Offline, in what we call “real life,” things are different.
Dragon, as it turns out, is a very touchy person. I saw that when she first
arrived outside my house.
When the car bringing Dragon pulled into the driveway,
I was sitting in the trunk of my mother’s Volvo station wagon. As she and
Josh Shaine, our adult friend from online and Dragon’s source of transportation,
climbed out of his car, I hopped sideways out of the Volvo—and landed on my
behind on the hard driveway. Josh Shaine, who was already out of his car and
was standing by where I had been sitting, started laughing at me. Dragon came
up beside him, and from the ground I could see her hug him—a nice, tight squeeze
from the side. He hugged her back, firmly but not quite so hard.
And so the time went, that night when he was here and
then the next evening when he came back before making the long drive back
to Massachusetts. Dragon was hanging on him nonstop, to the point where she
was making my parents quite uncomfortable.
That’s just the way that Dragon is. She’s just a touchy,
cuddly person. Josh Shaine is like a father to her. There is nothing more
going on between Dragon and Josh Shaine than fatherly and daughterly love,
and Dragon sees no better way to express it than the way she did those two
nights.
I happen to be the exact opposite of Dragon in this case.
I am not a touchy person in the least. No one touched me in any way for years,
with the exception of my mother’s hugs ever now and then, and even those were
half-hearted for me.
I suppose it was my fault. I had isolated myself from
the world offline gradually from fourth grade. Teasing and the realization
that I was different from my peers led to separation from them, and new perspectives
from which to see my parents made me find them annoying while actions led
me to believe them to be untrustworthy. By eighth grade, I was locking myself
up in whichever room held my computer and completely avoiding the majority
of the people offline and the touch of all.
Quite frankly, I was afraid of touch. Whenever I sat
down next to someone I made sure that there was no physical contact. When
my father unexpectedly rushed to hug me in the airport last December, I fell
backwards onto the ground. I was so unaccustomed to feeling the skin of another
human being that the very idea of it frightened me.
Part of it was probably the fact that I am bisexual.
I didn’t want to attach any kind of feelings to anyone, especially the crush
kind. Books like to describe crushes as being unusually aware of the other
person’s presence. I found it impossible not to be aware of the presence of
another body. I felt that touching—actual physical contact with another human
being—would magnetize that feeling. I was unaware of the boundaries between
liking a person as a friend and having a crush on that person. I was afraid
that physical contact with a person, this girl who was my first close friend
in years in particular, would lead to emotions bouncing off the walls. I
did not want to complicate things by finding out that I liked my best friend.
Dragon told me that she would get me to change
my mind about touch. She told me that by the time she left my house, I would
no longer fear touch. In fact, she said, I would learn to rather like it.
Being the stubborn person I am, and thinking that I knew myself and what I
would and would not do, I told her that she would not be able to change my
mind. She insisted that she would. Dragon was nearly always right and she
felt that she knew both me and her own abilities. I muttered that she wouldn’t
be able to and let the conversation go at that. Let her try, I thought.
It can’t do any harm. And so it began.
Dragon had arrived on a Friday. For two days I
held out. Then, on Sunday night, we watched The Ring.
The Ring is a horror movie. I had never before seen a
horror movie. When my brother Joe suggested watching The Ring, Dragon and
I agreed. She hadn’t seen a horror movie in ten years, so neither of us knew
what to expect.
The movie was disturbing. It was not scary, but it was
definitely disturbing. When the movie started, I was seated comfortably on
the arm of the oversized chair in the family room, and Dragon was in the seat
of the chair. By the time the movie was over I was in an L-shaped position
with my legs still on the arm of the chair with my upper body stretched over
the back of the chair. I had to view The Ring from behind Dragon. I couldn’t
handle the movie. The whole concept behind it was too overwhelming.
When the movie was over, none of us was left unaffected.
Joe handled it by refusing to go upstairs to bed and instead watching music
videos. Dragon handled it by making a cup of hot chocolate, despite her being
lactose intolerant. I handled it by leaning on Dragon and refusing to move.
Yes, it had been done. I had willingly leaned on another
person, felt her skin under my head, allowed her to stroke my hair while trying
to comfort me. When she moved, I followed. Before she couldn’t get near me,
and then she couldn’t get me away.
Leaning on Dragon like that, especially the need to do
so, thoroughly scared me. Leaning on others was a foreign experience for me,
and I was surprised by Dragon’s tolerance and allowance for it. Later that
night I went upstairs and jotted a note down on the computer, expressing my
fear and thanking my friend. When she read it, Dragon had me stand up, and
she hugged me. It was wonderful, purely wonderful. Feelings of security and
comfort washed through me, and I relaxed. Dragon was there. She didn’t mind
my actions. She was fine with them, and fine with me. And I was fine, for
the length of the hug. The movie, and everything else, no longer bothered
me. I was okay.
I’m not sure if it was Dragon who did it, or whether
it was the movie. It was the movie that paralyzed me, and it was the movie
that made me need human touch over everything else. However, Dragon was the
person I went to. She was the person who was my best friend. She was the
person who had played with my hair over the previous two days, the only form
of touch I had allowed at the time. She was the person with whom I could
have the real, carefree fun that I could only remember experiencing four,
maybe five times before in my life. She was the person I trusted, and the
only person I would allow to touch me. Sure, I could have gone upstairs and
woken up my parents, but I didn’t. I went to Dragon, and that was something
special.
Over the next day and a half, until Dragon was picked
up by another of our adult friends, it continued. Dragon was right. I learned
that by isolating myself from everyone, I was missing out on the joy of life.
I loved those days, when it was okay to lean against a friend and talk to
her, and to actually feel that, yes, she was there, and she cared, and she
wouldn’t let me go through it all alone.
Since Dragon left, I have hand no human contact. She
is still the only one I will allow to hug me (or anything else of the sort),
and the only person I will allow myself to lean on. Through her visit, though,
I learned that touch is not bad. Touch is very good and very special, and
someday I will be okay with it. Someday I will allow myself to experience
it, to feel the joy but not the fear. I now crave touch and the security it
brings, and someday, someday I will be able to handle it.