speaking and touching

When we are young and do not know the language of bodies we must tease out things with our tongues, curling around words like they are objects in a vacuum. We spit as many as we can and in all the wrong places. Sitting next to someone on a grassy hill with on a cool evening you say “I heard somewhere that when you are close to someone your heartbeats will synchronize.” So instead of aligning the curves of your naked bodies and tussling down the hill you lie on your sides and face each other. There is at least six inches of space and it is dark but you look at your faces and your hands lie right next to each other and you try to listen to your own uneven heart.
Most people get past this tranquil method of touching-not-touching. Most people get older and they stop running into doorframes and open cabinets because they stop getting taller. They settle into their size and weight and sometimes hairstyles and they know how to move, to shuffle down a pew without stepping on people's toes and how to twitch to music so someone else will notice. When you grow up you hit a point where it is no longer acceptable to lie still, happy and tingling but pretending as though nothing is wrong, as the person next to you grazes their fingers along the sides of your arm. You have to wake up in the morning and say “nothing happened” when in your mind everything did. You have to kiss them, or not, you have to touch their cheeks and at the airport you have to say goodbye like you mean or wave like you don't. Things have to be decided and they must be either unspoken or discussed at length and there is no inbetween. There is no “I like you but I don't want to.” There is only I like you I like you I love you I don't love you anymore. At some point you understand it is just your lips, it is only your legs, you are just toes and fingers and there's no point in not using them. You don't speak in words because words mean everything. You speak in bodies because you understand they mean nothing and at this point, nothing is all you want and nothing is what is safe and your words are too specific so nothing is what you get.