Skin to Skin
Keep in touch, said the more tender voice, looking up at a deeply familiar face. The cicadas had been trying their best to drown out all human utterings on this weighted humid day, but the words managed to linger in the air.
For both children, these words felt as promising as they were painful — though neither would have the emotional faculties or space to process such nuanced introspection for decades to come.
Perhaps they did sense that touch was the one certain act and sensation that would cease for the coming year, once this moment departed. That the simple gift of being able to reach out to put skin to skin — between siblings, between kin — whether to strike and wrestle in frustration or to hold quietly in nearness and comfort — seemed such obvious natural rights that their impending embargo was too profound for either of the children to grasp. They did not know. They could not know.
I’ll miss you, was all the elder one could reply, because that is what young folk are modeled to say at partings. Insufficient words that fail to capture the warmth, sweat, and smell of year after year of long adventures, quiet readings, hot tears, and tired sleeps together — in touch. And all the touches now denied into being, existing only in some alternate happy history.
