Contact.

I live in a city of ten million people.  Inevitably, contact occurs.  Shoulders brush.  One hand grips another.  Sounds stream through the air to collide with an eardrum.  Florescent signs cast garish light on ancient temples.  Rain drops stream down one cheek only to meet the foot of another.  East meets West.  Random collisions are mingled with deliberate touch. 

It is the latter that I miss.  When touch becomes a mere byproduct arising from the completion of daily activities, it loses meaning.  Touch becomes a sterile thing, devoid of intimacy.  Human connections fizzle and die before their potential is realized.  Existence becomes insular.  This has been my hardest challenge. 

 

Huxley captured this phenomenon more accurately than I can ever hope to.  He wrote:

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.  The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single  self-transcendence; in vain.  By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.  Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and,except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.  We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.  From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.  

I do not desire to be an island any longer.