Waiting

I was not going to post this, an entry from my journal. But in my heart I am an artist and a poet and I can not be these things if I am not willing to expose my deepest thoughts and my most treasured secrets.

So. . .
Journal entry #1
Waiting:

Human touch is so rare and foreign to me that I actually cringe from its happening. This is a basic fact about me. Yet, I can think of nothing that I crave more.

I watched a movie where collisions, and car crashes, and conflict were explained as the human beings need for human touch (ironically enough, it was about people in L.A. who live their lives going from one tar paved and unsidewalked highway to another). Can we need human interaction so much that when deprived of it we begin to crash in to each other? I think so, I think that we would rather shout at each other than be faced with silence. With this theory in mind, I think that I am about to crash. I sometimes wonder as I cross the street or walk across a crosswalk what it would be like to be run into, run over, collided with. Not for the tragedy of it or even the fictitious glory, but for the factor of humanity and of touch. Because one person would run to my half conscious body sprawled across the road, and he or she would hold me and tell me that everything was going to be okay. Is everything going to be okay?
At what point in my life, I wonder, did I begin to cringe when someone brushes against me in passing? A pat on the shoulder feels like an electrical shock. When someone hugs me, I become paralyzed, so much so that I do not realize until they have awkwardly let go that I wished I had hugged them back. The act of holding someone's hand is a mystery, like an unknown fact or a word missing from my vocabulary. Feeling my lips pressed up against someone else's is inconceivable to me. Being held by someone, incomprehensible. When did these facts become my reality? I am not sure, but they are. Somewhere in the stage between girl and woman I forgot what touch was and learned instead, fear. I remember hugging and kissing my father every night, my mother too, my brothers. I know my favorite memory to be of my brother, who always said goodnight kisses were too childish for him, sneaking into my room one night when he thought I was asleep and kissing my cheek. I remember letting my mother run her hands through my hair a I lay beside her on the couch, this I allowed even after childhood had passed, this rarity. So now, I dream and wait for someone who will hold me long enough to realize that I want to hug them back. And I buy pretty smelling shampoos that make my hair shiny and soft hoping that someday someone will run their fingers through it. Removing fear and learning love. This I will wait for.