They say sex is a powerful force for human bonding.  But…no.  It isn’t sex.  It’s touch.  I wrote this back in 2007, when I was going through another bad patch of missing Keith…

Alone

A few moments spent in the arms of someone you love can bring you back.  Even if a few moments is all you get, it can bring you back.  At least, for a while.

This wasn’t as intimate as it sounds.  I was on my way to Key West, and stopping by Hilton Head I’d taken him out to dinner on the island that night.  We shared a hug in the parking lot.  A very, very long hug.  He knew how unhappy I was.  So he gave me that long, goodbye hug.  But that was all it was.  And it lifted my spirits considerably, given how depressed I was after I’d caught that glimpse of his happy domesticity earlier the previous day…

How To Make Your Ex Bleed In One Easy Step…

You want to make someone you dumped bleed?  I mean, really, really bleed?  I mean, Profusely…?  Here’s my little tip:  Don’t tell him about all the great sex you’re having now that he’s out of your life.  Don’t bother telling him that your new boyfriend is so much better in the sack then he’ll ever be in his wildest wet dream fantasies.  Don’t tell him how much your new boyfriend understands you so much better then he ever did.  That’s amateur stuff.  Really.  You want to give him a hurt he’ll take to his grave, and hopefully sooner rather then later, just mention in passing some small bit of domesticity that you and your new main squeeze are currently enjoying…

Me:  So I’ll probably be in town in an hour or so…you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere after I get settled in…

He:  Um…well actually (XXX) and I are about to go grocery shopping in a bit…  Why don’t you call when you get in.  If you want…there’s some good British comedy shows on TV later tonight you can watch at the hotel.  

STAB!  SLASHHHHH!  Bleed!

BleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleed….

Me:  Err…yeah…

And, so on.  If there wasn’t at least one major heart wound it wouldn’t be Christmas…

It was right after that I wrote a post about how depressed I was that alarmed a bunch of people.  Interestingly enough, it was also shortly after that I got my first nastygram from an anonymous AOL poster.

A few months ago I was overjoyed that Keith was coming up for a visit.  Finally.  I’d been trying for years to coax him to come up here and see the house I’d bought for myself, and the life I was living up here in Charm City, and maybe even meet some of my friends, particularly the group of gay guys I regularly do a Friday night happy hour with in Washington D.C.  And…deep down inside…I wanted to have him here under my roof for a few days, just to picture what it would have been like for us to have been lovers after all. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. 

As the day of his arrival up here in Baltimore approached, that old twitterpated feeling took hold once again, and for days I wore a great big smile and my attitude went way, way positive.  It affected everything.  I spent weeks beforehand, cleaning and tidying up everything around Casa del Garrett so it would be perfect.  My energy levels at work jumped a hundred fold.  I was polishing off work items one right after the other like they were nothing.  I felt Good, in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager in love for the first time.  Everyone at work and in my personal life noticed it.  I was happy.  Content.  Blissful.  Life was good.  Life was sweet.  So very, very sweet.  And he hadn’t even arrived yet.  But somehow, something deep inside knew what was coming. 

My body sang.  My energy levels soared.  The day he came, he called first and said he was in Baltimore and on his way.  And I immediately got this familiar knot in my stomach, just like I did years ago, when I was a teenager, and in love, and expecting any moment now to see the object of my affections.  And when he left after a few days, I dropped into a deep grey funk the likes of which I’ve never experienced before.  Ever. 

When he came here and I was showing him around Casa del Garrett for the first time (he’d never been here before…) and I was showing him the upstairs and the bathroom which had a lot of remodeling done by the previous owner…and he gently mocked how technical I was getting when I described the improvements and I laughed with him and say "Hey…I’m a techno geek…okay?" and he laughed and put his arms around me and hugged…  And…and…  For a moment I saw how my life could have been had I been loved…even for a short time.  But he doesn’t want to be that person in my life and all I have ever been able to do is just imagine how it would be.  Now I can remember how it feels to have someone put their arms around me while we’re laughing together at some foible of mine.  But he doesn’t love me and it seems I will never have love except in my imaginings and my dreams. 

Thing of it is, I Knew I was going to experience a funk after he left Baltimore.  Logically at least.  I Knew it.  I thought I would get through it like I always have. But it was worse then anything this time.  It wasn’t just I was heartsick.  My body Ached.  I lost energy…it was like the floor had been pulled out from under me.  At the office I was reasonably fine…I was able to get my work done and interact with my co-workers almost like nothing had happened.  But at home I wandered around my little rowhouse in a daze.  Like I’d fallen down the stairs.  Like I’d been hit by a car.  Like I’d just had my arms cut off. 

And in a sense, I had.  Now that I’m settled a bit, I think I understand it better.  It’s something like this…

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb (even an organ, like the appendix) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. Approximately 5 to 10% of individuals with an amputation experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb, and the majority of the sensations are painful… 

Although not all phantom limbs are painful, patients will sometimes feel as if they are gesturing, feel itches, twitch, or even try to pick things up…

-Wikipedia – Phantom Limb

That moment we shared while I was geeking out in the bathroom…I kept feeling his arms around me in that moment, over and over again throughout my misery, well into the next month.  It wasn’t just my heart.  My body kept insisting that something was missing.  It was dreadful.

How many times do we hear broken hearted lovers say that loosing that lover, that other half, felt like they’d had an arm cut off?  In 1982 I picked up a copy of Howard Cruse’ Gay Comics and saw a story by French Cartoonist Patric Marcel titled, One For Sorrow…

Imagine having your arm torn off…  There would be pain of course…but more important would be the sudden lacking, and the futile urge to have it back on…

I was well aware of what he was talking about by then.  And imagery like that exists throughout the landscape of lost love.  It’s more then just a metaphor I am convinced now.  It really is something like that phantom limb phenomena.  I’m a geek…okay?  Bear with me here…

We have all these little ways of expressing sociability, fraternity, via various kinds of ritualized touch.  Moments where we are permitted to cross the physical boundary between us.  Handshakes are the most common one I can think of right now.  I’ve heard it said they evolved as a way of letting a stranger know your intentions are friendly.  Look…I’m unarmed…  Some cultures allow for a bit more.  A formalized kind of greeting kiss.  A pat on the shoulders.  Greeting hugs have become more common in American culture in my lifetime then they were when I was a kid.  They serve to introduce and reinforce social bonds.  But these are more, it turns out, then simply acknowledgments of social regard.  Operating below the levels of rational consciousness, below even the lower primate and mammalian brain, is the platform it all rests upon. 

We understand, if incompletely, that touch is a powerful thing, and we need to be careful how we let others do that to us.  Not just as a matter of physical security, but emotional security too.  To get close requires a cultivation of trust.  It’s not just that someone within arm’s reach can take a swing at you so you have to be careful.  It’s when you permit someone’s touch, you are making them a part of you.  I mean that literally.  The more intimate that touch, the more intimately they become a part of you.  It really is that powerful a thing.

Our bodies map themselves, and remap themselves constantly.  We have to learn how to do things like walk, run, ride bicycles, dance, hammer nails, brush teeth.  The alien feel of a new tool becomes, after many hours of use, as if part of the hand and arm.  And to our mind now, to the body’s inner map, it is.  You pick it up, it’s There.  Even something as complex as an automobile becomes an extension of the body, once its behavior has been mapped by the brain.  Accelerate…back off a little…flick up the turn signal stalk…turn the wheel a bit…  It’s not the car moving through traffic, it’s you.  And when you get behind the wheel of a different car, it feels strange for a while, until your body has had a chance to map that one out too.

But the car doesn’t touch back.  A favorite tool lost or stolen can make you angry, but you caress the world with the tool, it doesn’t caress you back.  People (and pets) are different.  They touch back.  And our bodies map that touch to itself.  And more…

Oxytocin Hormone: The Cuddle Hormone is the Body’s Own Love Potion

Research suggests that if a love potion does in fact exist, the mammalian hormone called oxytocin is likely the key ingredient.

Oxytocin is a hormone produced naturally in the hypothalamus in the brain. Studies have shown that oxytocin is associated with our ability to mediate emotional experiences in close relationships and maintain healthy psychological boundaries.

In studies with non-human mammals, oxytocin has been shown to promote nest building and pup retrieval, acceptance of adopted offspring, and the formation of adult pair-bonds.

This important hormone is naturally released in response to a variety of environmental stimuli including skin-to-skin contact, uterine or cervical stimulation during sex, nipple stimulation in lactating women, and as the result of a baby moving down the birth canal.

[Emphasis mine]  They say it’s sex that bonds a couple.  Not…exactly.  It’s touch.  Which happens during sex of course.  But everywhere else in a couple’s relationship too and those ways, I am convinced now, are much more meaningful and fundamental.  Your lover can touch you in ways even a dear friend cannot, and not simply in sexual ways.  Your lover can ruffle your hair, stroke your neck, rest a hand on your cheek.  It’s a private language every couple invents for just themselves.  This touch means one wordless thing…that touch another.  Your lover can reach a hand out and lightly touch yours with just a fingertip, and send a tremble through your body.  And your body knows that person’s touch, has it mapped out and stored in its mindless subconscious automatic understanding of what it itself is.

And when that touch isn’t there anymore, it’s a shock the body refuses to accept for a time.  Like a phantom limb, you can still feel those arms around you, that hand inside of yours, and it is a torment.  One that broken hearted and jilted lovers aren’t really being taught how to cope with, because everyone keeps telling them that it’s all in their mind.  But it isn’t.  Not entirely.  It’s in their bodies too.  They have, in a very nearly literal sense, lost a physical part of themselves.