The Beginner
It is a Thursday evening and I am in a yoga class. It is warm in the studio, a steady 85 degrees by the thermostat and likely more, with bodies arrayed on mats in rows throughout the room. The back of my neck is damp and wisps of hair stick to my skin. A drop of sweat runs down my cheek and onto the floor below.
Whatever pose I am in – which I neither remember nor care to share, since yoga is like sex, something I love but prefer to talk about only occasionally, and not in agonizing detail – requires me to slide my shoulders down, ease them back into a reasonable position somewhere away from my ears. All poses require this of me. Life requires this of me. Yet there are my shoulders, hunched and tense, crawling upward, as if they have an old witch’s curse to whisper to me. Slide the shoulders down, spread the shoulder blades, accordion the rib cage, give yourself space.
From behind I feel the teacher approach. Gently, she places one hand on my neck, the other on my shoulder. My body, muscles and joints and tendons alike, relax into something less awkward. The way the teachers touch at this studio, the way they are trained to lay hands on students, is unlike anything I have experienced. I feel momentarily healed, but of what?
I try not to focus on this as I breathe into the pose, try not to get too outside my body. But as she moves her hands away and we proceed in the practice, it is my brain that untwists itself and lays me flat. I thought I wanted sex, I think to myself, but god. How much I just want someone to touch me. How long can a person live without physical affection? How are people supposed to live like this? I rearrange myself on the mat and idly wish the teacher would come back to correct me again.
It is no wonder this is the one place I spend time hoping, at some level, that I am doing something wrong.
We move through life in the company of other humans whether we want to or not. They’re on public transit, at the grocery story, in our homes, at the office. Sometimes we touch them accidentally, and it is a jolt of sensation and confusion. How many times have I jerked my hand back involuntarily when a cashier fumbles the money and touches me? How easily do I jump when I brush against a colleague? I don’t want strangers to touch me. My body is attuned mostly to certain kinds of touch, so it is ill-equipped to to interpret others beyond those it has been trained to understand.
Our space is personal, and even in public touch is mostly a private matter. We learn how to touch ourselves, who else to touch, why and when. We break the rules, or we flaunt them. Mostly these rules are about sex and desire and emotion, about propriety and boundaries.
But touching is a language. There are many parts of it we leave out of our human curriculum, as if we should only teach the canon. We learn about fighting, hurting one another, physical cruelty. We are told about all the sex we should be having, whether single or otherwise relationship-ed, and how we should be having it. We are told much less about the ways in which it is so hard for humans to live without some kind of physical affection.
Often when I take the train, I watch the other passengers. They are distracted by music, phones, books. They are asleep. They do their makeup or stare out the window. I think about them, their faces at times unwittingly open, and I wonder: what if one of them has spent a lifetime without some kind of physical affection? What if no one has ever touched her in a way that made her feel tended to, enveloped, loved?
Once, in a chat with a friend, I joked “carbs are like a hug for your insides.” We laughed about this for days.
A month or so ago someone said to me, “I’m not very good at holding hands. I have a lot of nervous energy. But I’ll try.” Whether he’ll get better is no longer my guess, but I think about this from time to time.
We learn to touch by experience. I spent many years doing that backwards dance, thinking I would find love and affection through sex. The truth is things rarely work out that way. But the truth is we don’t always find sex through love and affection either. The truth is deeper than this. The truth is, like my contorted self in yoga, that we are all telling ourselves witches’ secrets.
I want someone to hold my hand. Perhaps some, like the man from a month ago, want something else. Or perhaps most of us don’t want to be touched at all, because then we would have to know how we feel.
I want to start over, to confess myself a beginner, to allow someone to touch me with kindness and to feel myself crumble beneath it, no matter how much I want to pull my body away. I want to do this wrong so I can learn to speak it right.
