The intimacy of strangers

This past week I found myself packed into a crowded elevator, pressed shoulder to hip to toe with other bodies. I stood there holding my breath, trying to keep claustrophobia at bay, wondering if the woman behind me liked the mango papaya scent of my shampoo. At one point during the slow journey upward, I realized I was pressed somewhat intimately against the man beside me. I could feel the curve of his right shoulder and the arc of his belly that nearly pressed against mine. His breath fogged my cheek. For a split second, a bizarre irrationality came over me and I almost leaned into him. Not in a perverse way, but in a human way, something that, if voiced, would sound like, "Hey, we're all in this together."

In our relatively touch-free culture, there are scant opportunities to express this most basic of human conditions: That we all need love and that love is communicated through contact. For those of us not in relationships or, worse, in long-distance relationships (which have all the restrictions and few of the perks of actual relationships) our tactile exchanges are limited. So our bodies, still primal after all these millennia, reach out to others in subtle ways and we suddenly find ourselves intimate with strangers.

The ultimate manifestation of which, not surprisingly, is the one-night-stand, that nameless, essentially faceless exchange that is not so much about sex — a clumsy, fumbling act at best — and more about a shared moment of contact. I'm convinced that when we reach our breaking point, when we start giving strangers the eye, we're not motivated by "horniness" (a terrible word, even on a good day), but by the need to be touched. This is when we start treading on the dangerous ground of regrettable behavior.

I realized — in the same week as the elevator incident — that I had reached my own personal threshold of not being touched. At the end of a blasé yoga practice, an hour and a half filled with stretching, sweating and asking myself why I had signed up for this torture, the instructor led us into the final relaxation period. She asked us to lie back on our mats with our eyes closed, along the back of my neck and then pressed into the tense third eye space on my forehead. She ran her fingers along my scalp and through my hair. I kept my eyes shut during the whole process and my mouth stayed closed, but my mind mouthed a silent "thank you." The moment — as they so often are — was fleeting, but it was enough to remind me that I'd reached the danger point of temptation. Rather than eyeing strange men on the street, I need a safer outlet. Perhaps I'll book a massage.

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