Touch.

On Touch as Mercy, Witness, and a Necessary Risk

Touch is one of the first languages we learn, long before we understand words or rules or the careful choreography of what is allowed. Before we know how to ask, we know how to reach. A hand closes around a finger. A body leans into warmth. Touch tells us we are here and that someone else has noticed.

And yet, as we grow older, touch becomes complicated. It is regulated. Policed. Withheld. We learn when it is permitted and when it might cost us something. Our dignity, our safety, our story about who we are supposed to be. We learn to survive without it, or we convince ourselves we have. But the body remembers. It always does.

I think about all the people who spend their lives building happiness elsewhere. Cities that let them breathe, lovers who see them clearly, chosen families who call them by their real names. Only to return home again and again to places that once felt like battlegrounds. Childhood houses thick with old silences. Living rooms where arguments still echo in the walls. They return not because the place is kind, but because something familiar still lives there. A couch where a hand once rested on their knee. A kitchen where a grandmother brushed crumbs from their cheek. They return, often unconsciously, in search of touch. In search of a body that knows theirs.

The AIDS Memorial (#WhatIsRememberedLives) shared a story that has stayed lodged in me, the way certain truths do, refusing to be metabolized into something easier. Ray Black wrote about his friend Gib Jones, an actor and dancer, dying in St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1992. Gib had multidrug-resistant TB. Visitors were supposed to wear masks. Ray took his off so Gib could see a human face. He kissed him on the forehead. Gib died in that moment. Ray writes that he felt the life force leave his body. He was twenty-eight. It was the first time he had been present for a death.

What I can’t stop thinking about is not only the courage of that act, but the necessity of it. How long had it been since Gib had been touched without fear? How many months, maybe longer, since someone had risked their own safety to offer him something as simple and as radical as skin-to-skin presence? Touch is not an accessory to care. It is care. In that room, at the end of Gib’s life, touch was not symbolic. It was essential. It said: you are not dangerous to me. You are still human. You can go.

I remember that era vividly. The way people living with HIV and AIDS were treated as if proximity itself was a moral failure. I remember a cousin who came home to die. Delancey Jones. The house felt different once he arrived, as if the air had been not-so-quietly rearranged. Most of the family kept their distance. They spoke from sidewalks, with plenty of wind between them. They avoided sitting too close, if they sat at all. Touch, in the rare times it came, was gloved in hesitation. It was me and my grandmother who hugged him. Who showed up with no fear. I was twelve. I remember how his body shook when we held him, how emotion moved through him like weather finally breaking. I did not understand the politics of it then. I only understood that he needed to be held, and that we were doing something true.

Touch is not only about comfort. It is about recognition. It tells the nervous system that it is safe enough to stand down. I saw this once in a police interrogation room on an episode of The First 48. A young man sat across from detectives, refusing to speak, refusing to betray anyone. His body was rigid with resolve. After hours of pressure, one detective reached across the table and held his hand. That was all. The man went limp. His shoulders dropped. His resistance dissolved. Watching it, I felt a quiet horror. Not because he gave in, but because of how easy it was to see what he had been missing. That kind of touch was probably rare in his life. Not as a boy becoming a man. Not as the person he had grown into. I remember thinking that someone might still be alive if that need had been met earlier, in a safer way, long before it arrived in a room with fluorescent lights and consequences.

In 2002, when I was pledging, I went months without being properly held. Not the casual brush of bodies passing in hallways, but the kind of holding that lets you rest your weight somewhere else. One night, in a parking lot, Shayla looked at me and asked if I needed a hug. I told her to leave me be. Even at twenty, I knew what that would do to me. I knew I would unravel, and I wasn’t sure I could put myself back together in public. She waited. Moments later, in the dairy aisle of Walmart, she threw my “leave me be” to the wind, came up behind me, and wrapped her arms around me with the full-bodied certainty of someone who knows how to hold a child who has had a long day. I collapsed. I cried hard, there among the milk and eggs, strangers pretending not to see. Shayla stayed. She didn’t rush me. She held me until my breathing changed.

That hug rearranged something in me. It reminded me how close we all are to undoing, and how little it takes to save us from it.

I think, too, about the times I had sex because I didn’t know how to ask for a hug. Or because asking felt more dangerous than offering my body up in other ways. Somewhere in the closeness, in the weight and warmth and brief illusion of being wanted, I could access what I needed. It wasn’t always healthy. Often it was costly. But it was understandable. We do many things to get our needs met when the honest path feels unavailable. We drink. We stay too long. We return to places that hurt us. We settle for fragments of touch because asking for it plainly feels like an exposure we have not been taught how to survive.

Touch changes everything. It can soften the hardest posture. It can usher someone out of the world. It can stop a spiral before it begins. It can say what language fails to carry: I see you. I am not afraid of you. You can rest here.

We need touch. Not as an indulgence, but as a necessity. We need the courage to ask for it without dressing the request up as something else. And we need to become more attentive to when others are asking with their bodies because they don’t yet have the words. If we learned anything from those hospital rooms, those interrogation tables, those grocery store aisles, it is this: withholding touch is never neutral. And offering it, when done with care, can be a kind of salvation.

---