We can never truly touch. I know this, as I know the offset rotation of the earth, her drunken lurch through space and time.
Our skin can seem to touch, there’s that, and at one level, that’s enough. The intimate brush of flesh on flesh, friction that we counteract with passion’s warm wetness.
But our atoms remain,
apart.
Electrons may drift in common clouds,
may interact and influence,
But nuclei remain, mine and yours,
literal poles apart; forbidden by universal laws
from ever coexisting, or even
the faintest brush of contact.
We hover, then, enmeshed in human terms, but separated literally, alone in our skin.
Yet, even in this bleak realisation, a twist – we can’t touch ourselves either.
My finger-tips come infinitely close together, yet still a universe of space remains; for what is space if not insurmountable, eternal?
An emptiness between my fingers, an emptiness between our lips, an emptiness from here to there: if touch is but a lie of repulsion, it still compels, and I’ll be gladly, blissfully lied to, so long as I lie with you.
