[ASMR] Can I touch your face? or Yes 1

But I’m generally averse to touch. Not sex, that’s never been an issue. The other kinds.

Hugs. Hand holding. Touching in public.

Tiptoeing behind a friend at their desk and propping my chin on their head to look at their work.

Keeping my chin balanced there so that when they say hello, my mouth goes up and down.

Sitting with my back to the arm of a couch we hauled off the sidewalk and stretching my legs across theirs at a perpendicular angle.

Eye contact.

Dancing in the club.

Touching the wreath of feet at the bottom of a round jacuzzi.

Sharing a bed with a friend.

Sharing a bed with a lover.

Sampling a bite of their life-changing burrito (or sandwich or ice cream sandwich or ice cream
cone) and having to decide if it is more awkward to bite inside the shape where their teeth
have already been or to make a fresh dent somewhere else, like a corner they might have been
saving because it looks like it will have the perfect ratio of sauce to rice to meat.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the touch thing is due to germs, but it’s not. I am afraid to have a
body that can act on others. Be acted on. Take the difficulty of the hug, which my mom had to
ask me to accept at the end of playdates or birthdays. Even as an adult, it demands a rapid
calculation. Otherwise, we might hug for too long or smell weird or bounce boobs like a pair of
early-2000s Mars rovers trying to land on each other.

In other words, my deranged embodiment is in love with its nonexistence, this barely-breathing
hesitation that I carry with me like dry trees listening to the buzz of a power line.
Ideally, I would like not to be perceived. My actions would have no consequences. Better—I
would not act. I would cease. I don’t want to die. Is an ASMR video a form of self-annihilation?
A generic contract with someone who will tell you to sleep, who will make exhaustion a
command, who will unironically don rubber dish gloves, slather them in lotion, and wring their
hands over a Blue Yeti microphone for the sounds. She has distilled the perception of intimacy
out of the precision of the obvious, the uncomfortably harmless—slimy rubber gloves.

Listen: I am hesitating on the edge of a love whose effortlessness has to be calculated, has to
come from a place of practiced sweetness, matter of fact care, caress. If you’re not looking at
someone with their hands between the beams of your shoulders while you sit on the floor
between their legs, without touching their legs, with your back to them seated on a couch
above you, not looking into their eyes, what does that make you to each other?

And from the other direction, with me on the couch and their body braced against my hands, I
move knot by knot across the river of someone’s back the way I’d knead a loaf of bread, clinical
and attentive, propping open some cool indifference between us where the closeness is
anyone’s and we love through each other, and the whole wide kernel of the motherboard of
the need opens around us, weightless and polluted (the vacuum that belongs to billionaires, is
that really the best metaphor?), like water pressing harmlessly against plastic cables that tunnel
through submerged canyons except in the rare event of seabed avalanches, when the sound we
heard was the shapeless crush of sand and silt and flotsam and detritus and lobster shells and
tubeworms—how do we love in a world so swiss-cheesed by fact?

Yes.

I’ve never been good at scale, so come close, whisper in my ear, I have something to tell you:
this poem is for exactly one person, and I don’t know why. This poem is for exactly one person,
everyone will think of themselves, and this poem could be for any of them, but it isn’t. Please I
tried, I’m sorry. The water is low. The threshold they’re searching for will never be there. There
is no rock bottom; the disaster has already happened; what about its anticipation appeals to
you anyway?