if i could touch the sky

on touch, hormones, and learning to feel

me on a boat in koh phi phi, thailand at sunrise

One of the best things about the beach is feeling so many different things. Sand in your hair. Sun on your skin. Water in your eyes. When I wade in the water I am brought back to a feeling of being unborn.

I once was a fetus, grounded in a body that let me float. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t have to try to stay afloat once I was born, but life became all about treading the water that acts as walls in a house of hate. Now that I am alive and actually living in a garden of me, I sometimes swim in the bath which the birds drink from, too. When I touch my skin I am grounded in a pool of myself. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

I remember in science class as a kid I learned about the Locard principle of exchange. Essentially, when one touches something they leave their mark, print, and DNA. When someone then touches that surface, they leave theirs too, at the same time picking up the printed DNA from the last person. It is usually used in forensic and criminal science, but I find this to be an interesting theory. It says: we leave a lasting impact on the things that we touch.

That is to say, touch is important. How we touch, why we touch, who we touch, are all questions that can be answered by confidence and trust. 

Touch can look so many different ways. There is, of course, physical touch, which can be all the way from friends hugging or holding hands to lovers expressing their romantic affection with one another through intimacy. There is also the less literal meaning; “I was touched by this film”, for example. In this context, we usually mean that something made us feel something internally and therefore left a lasting impact on us. 

For me, I never used to like touch. Physical or emotional. I was closed off to feeling because I felt so numb in my body. Dysphoria left me feeling like a shadow, torn away from my own reality. My footsteps were puppeteered by a world that would rather see me king than queen. Dominant rather than elegantly powerful. Looking down and hugging my shadow long enough to transform it was a radical act of touch. Becoming real was the hardest thing for me to do. 

Because of my dysphoria, I would touch and it wouldn’t fully feel like me. I would feel and it wouldn’t fully feel like me. I was cast in a play that I struggled to remember the words to. Although the world tried to remind me of them over and over. 

Once upon a time, I took my tiny fingers and wrapped them around the hand of god. I don’t remember touch for the first time, but I remember wading in the bathtub, feeling a sense of calm as if I was back to being one with my creator. 

I grew older and my hands grew rougher. My mind became tougher. My nails short and stubby but my neck long like a giraffe. I was always elegantly disjointed. 

I remember the first time I kissed a girl. I was 13. Everyone told me to do it because me and her had been “dating” for months at that point. But I was so scared. Eventually, our lips touched on the playground after the last day of 7th grade. I had manned up and become what the world wanted me to be but I was left empty. Even if our lips met, I had not been touched. Locard’s Principle might not always be true. 

As a teenager, everyone was growing deeper into themselves while I was drifting further away. The boats all remained tied to the dock while my rope had slipped through an already faulty peg in the wood. I was left out to float in a sinking ship. I couldn’t connect with people for some reason. I always preferred to be alone, with my shadow, but even that was hard to be around. Something would change when I touched my shadow rather than stepped over it. I would have to get on my hands and knees and caress it's dark and empty silhouette so that it would become me. 

Sometimes I think about the first time I had sex. I let a woman touch me as if I was a man. I didn’t really know what to do, but who knows if that’s because it was my first time, or because I was encased in a shrine of expectation and fortitude. Eventually, I let myself become the idea of a man, and continued to fake my way through it for years. I used to think that something was wrong with me because I didn’t love having sex like everyone else. The truth is that I had been torn asunder, encased in separation between my mind and my body. I spent years doing breathwork and meditative practices to try to connect the two. All it did was make me care less about all of the stress in my body, ultimately numb to my reality. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ.･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Many poets have written about this idea of the self being an island. Cast astray in a sea so large that there is no way that you can be found. For so long, to be touched as if I was a man was to feel not like an island, but a single grain of sand on one of the beaches of the island. You couldn’t find me even if you tried. Even if you dug and dug and sifted and sorted. I was nowhere to be found. 

When I started taking estrogen you could have never told me that touch would be different. I wouldn’t have had enough feeling to understand the capacity of what I was being told. At the clinic they don’t tell you that how you experience touch will change. But my hairdresser did. 

I had been on hormones for just one month as she cut my hair into bangs and a bob. As my hair sifted through her fingers she asked if I had felt touch differently yet, because for her that had happened rather quickly. Suddenly in that moment I was aware of my amber waves feeling so soft and weightless, as if they were flowing in a field which harvested our deepest seeds. The softness of her hands did feel different this time, even though she had been cutting my hair for years. 

I started to notice the ways that I was feeling things differently, both physically and emotionally. The Golden Bachelor was airing on TV and it was all the craze. I never would have cried at something like that before, but my tears formed in a chemical swing of adjustment. Even though everyone on the show was much older than me, and widowed to life partners that they will never truly stop loving, I felt connected to this idea of being a widow. However, to myself. I had severed my relationship with expectation. I had come to terms with grieving the fact that my life was not going to be simple. I was touched by the idea that to be a widow is to lose something that you love but gain something so great in return: a body that lived and loved through it all. 

If I could touch the sky, I would. I’d reach so high that I wouldn’t be able to come down. I would be picking an apple from the tallest tree and feeling its waxy exterior. I would turn everything I touch into gold. I would let my silver tears flow from unexpected sources. The untapped crevices of my body that my blue pill can now reach and unlock. I had swallowed the key so long ago, but I found it somewhere between my breasts and my hips. Touch was becoming the physical softness of my soul. A seedling of my imagination that had now become. Seeds always sprout, afterall.