When Bodies Touch
by Roe McDermott
Saskia Jordá, Bound, industrial felt and hand-embroidery, 1 foot x 7 feet x 6 feet, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
WHEN BODIES TOUCH
ROE MCDERMOTT / APRIL 2021 / ISSUE 7
It’s been five months since anyone outside of my immediate family has touched me. Fourteen months since my partner has touched me. A decade since abuse first touched me. Three years since abuse last touched me. I can’t remember the last time a stranger touched me.
Every cell in your body regenerates every seven years.
This isn’t entirely true, but true enough.
Without feeling people touch me, I now spend my days feeling out things about my body that are true enough.
—
The uterine lining starts to shed every 28 days.
I bled before I was ten. Already taller than all the girls around me, the curves of emerging thighs and hips and breasts pulled and stretched my body in painful convex while my friends remained light, lithe little reedgirls. A decade on this earth and already I knew what it was like to feel that I took up too much space. I knew what it was like to have an adult man, a doctor, feel the buds on my chest and know intrinsically that this was wrong; his touch, my body, the reactions it evoked. I hid this blood from my parents for months, not shamed by my body but by this new visibility, this dependency, this need; I knew I was most acceptable when not asking for anything. Years later, I would realise that the pain that came with the blood wasn’t normal, would learn that my uterine lining does not shed my body as it should; it migrates and grows and clings to places it doesn’t belong, making my body twist and clench and constrict. Despite doctors’ ability to poke and prod and penetrate, it takes women with endometriosis, on average, seven years to be diagnosed. So much access to our bodies and yet so little desire to listen to our complaints of discomfort, of pain, of wrongness. We are told that this wrongness is normal, to be expected, to be endured.
These days, I speak to doctors on the phone. Doctors are touching patients less than ever. I wonder if they’re listening more. I wonder in the absence of touch, if all of us are listening more, or less; to our bodies, to each other?
—
The lining of your stomach reforms every two to nine days.
I experiment with throwing up early, my mouth burning with misplaced acid and bile. By fifteen, I’ve established a steady routine of deepthroating toothbrushes, hard plastic on my tongue, teeth scraping knuckle. Later, men groan and shudder as I open my throat to them and I wonder how the other women learned. I become enamoured with the way my eyes seem to lose colour after I purge, diluting to translucent grey as my electrolytes dance and my head turns helium. My thighs become slimmer, my face takes on new angles. Boys suddenly want me and I both love them and hate them all for it. I have learned the conditions of being thought desirable, and know that it is sickness, it is bile, it is my blood coughed up in the toilet bowl and left ME empty, hungry, wanting more. I hate that I associate the bitterness in my mouth with improvement, the texture of regurgitated food with being loved. I am a damaged baby bird.
I finally stop at 24—the only good thing that comes from loving the first man who abuses me. He says he hides me because he is ashamed to be seen with me; shows me the bodies of women that he wants and I cannot be. He fucks me and whispers in my ear that he finds me disgusting. I start to eat again. I keep my food down. For the first time, I want to be larger than I am. I want him to leave because I know I will never will.
People make jokes about their pandemic pounds; post about their plans to use this time to work out and lose weight; like Before & After photos of skinny white bodies getting skinnier. At a time where we are separated in order to protect our bodies, we are still determined to shrink our bodies. We are still told that our bodies are to be gazed at, still told to believe that there is only one type of body that others want to see, to touch, and that it is never ours.
—
Your outer epidermis is replaced every two to four weeks.
Despite travelling a lot, my skin remains pale, almost translucent, so that you can see ocean-coloured rivers and tributaries of blood pulsing beneath. As a teenager, I cut it open, again and again, in places no-one sees, take secret photographs of the angry fissures and bloody crevices, leaving scars you can only see in sunlight, glistening like invisible ink; a history of the unspoken across my limbs. The maps are largely invisible, but the treasure is more easily found, the coinscar above my ankle, shining like a silver dollar. Molten silver, forged with heat when the first abusive man pinned me down, held a lit cigar to my flesh, watched as I swallowed the screams back down my throat.
Now, my skin yearns for my partner in New Orleans, the one who rubs my shoulders, whose long hair tickles my face as he fucks me, whose fingers shape wood and make music and caress the ridges inside me until I lose words. We are meant to be together now, hands grasping the other’s flesh, creating impressions of our bodies in hot sand, licking saltwater off each other’s skin. These plans were made before human contact was declared a worldwide threat, even though with him I finally feel safe. We each have stories etched onto our skin. He has a black driftwood heart inked on his arm. I have words etched into mine in white, another secret scar. It reads ‘this obscene and beautiful making’ against my expanse of white.
“Skin hunger” becomes a common complaint among my friends, and I understand it; I miss hugs from my sister, the rustle of strangers walking close on a crowded street, the heat of bodies on a dancefloor, the chemistry-filled brushes of skin against a new person as we decide if we want to touch each other fully. But I’m also aware of the way my body has been force-fed touch for years, even in small ways; unwanted hugs from relatives, acquaintances, colleagues as handshakes are deemed “too formal”; the hands of men on face, my waist, the small of my back as I stand in line for a coffee, as I stand at a bar, as I stand in the world. I think of how over the coming months, people will ask permission before touching each other, and hope some of those questions stick.
—
Each hair on your scalp sheds every two to seven years.
My hair is honey blonde as a child, and friendly, well-meaning women love to stroke it; but I often cry and recoil, learning that touch and affection and gazes feel violent when unwanted. This is confusing. I want touch and affection so much. At ten, my hair begins to darken, my body and being caught in an awkward stage of transformation. Uncomfortable with this new ambiguity of self, I dye my hair red and become the scandal of my local school. This is not what nice girls do. I laugh at this, thinking how typical it is for Catholics to get so worked up about something dead. But I do care about my hair, too much. I dye my hair, straighten it, have it cut; relishing in a ritual that lets me leave behind parts of me that are split apart, damaged, unwanted. I pay hundreds of euro to have extensions bonded to my own hair. I no longer feel like myself without this hair that isn’t mine, and don’t know if that is dysmorphia or re-invention.
Today, people speak of missing their hairdresser in the same breath as missing holidays, missing family, missing freedom. I wonder if we are missing the human contact, too—the act of someone shampooing, massaging, rubbing our heads; this physical, consensual, trained act of care. The act of having someone help us feel like ourselves.
—
A child’s teeth fall out after six years.
Adult teeth can last a lifetime, but baby teeth are also known as ‘deciduous,’ like a tree, which means ‘tending to fall off.’ My incisors are noticeably sharp, and as a child I joke that I’m a vampire. This becomes true; at 17 I stop sleeping when I should, staring into the darkness all night, sleeping all day. In the dark I write, I eat, I drive up the mountains, I drive to men’s houses and let them touch me, feel their teeth on my flesh. When I tell doctors about my inverted sleeping they ask me if I’m anxious, if I’m depressed, and I don’t know how to answer. What does that feel like. What does the opposite feel like. I don’t find out until nearly a decade later.
At 26, I move to America and a doctor prescribes me pills that alter my brain chemistry. I swallow them dry, chalkiness coating my tongue. I start sleeping at night. My heart stops racing with the certainty that I am wrongness embodied. I no longer feel out of sync with everyone around me. I realise I could have felt like this all along, and I weep, grieving the decades lost. At 28, I find a man, a different type of man, who wants to sleep beside me, curl around me, be in stillness with me. We sleep in beds together. Until I can’t. I wait until he gets his fill of me or of whiskey or of both and passes out. I sob in the dark, the way I cannot come the morning light. It’s happening again. He is not different. Despite my pills, my choices are not different. With his drinks, his choices are never different. We are both people who tend to fall off.
In between lockdowns, I visit a new dentist. She immediately notices that I have cracks forming in my teeth, and asks me if I’m okay. I realise I have never had a dentist treat my teeth as being part of an entire body, an entire person; a difference that is supported by society. Dentist visits are not covered by my healthcare, and going to the dentist is surrounded with the fear of screeching tools and grinding punishment, not self-care. But within minutes, this dentist has discerned that I have PTSD and tells me that teeth grinding is a common side-effect; that my doctor or therapist should have warned me. She says that she has seen more patients starting to grind their teeth in the past year than she has seen over her entire career. I pay over a thousand euro to have my cracked teeth repaired, to have the missing bits replaced, to add back the length to my visibly shortened front teeth. In the mirror, I realise I have not seen my full smile in years; hadn’t even noticed it disappearing. I think of everyone who is slowly losing parts of their smiles this year and won’t realise until later.
—
Half of your heart stays from birth to death.
This means that over a lifetime, your heart contracts and expands like a universe. I wonder about which parts are fusing together, the old and the new, whether this fusing looks more like a bridge or scar. Wondering what parts of my heart are lost, which deeply embedded lessons and wounds and capacities remain; if the newly formed pieces look as all hearts do, like closed fists, or if they are open hands, reaching. I feel responsible for the new half that grows within me as an adult. The old half and I are peers, but to the new parts, I am parent, creator, home. I must teach it how to be loved. I never wanted to create life within my body. But, no matter. My body creates my life over and over. All matter.
Isolation and loneliness can cause long-term complications with, and damage, to the heart. This is not a metaphor, and it is. Attention must be paid to both.
—
The neurons that exist within your brain are present your entire life.
But the connections between them, the synapses that help store memories, are constantly changing. Mine sometimes misfire, store memories in the wrong places, generate shortcuts and new pathways so that time bends and the past is present. A whisper of cologne reaching my nostrils makes my heart turn percussion, my pores rain sweat, my ears ring alarms that no-one can hear. My neurons are faulty wiring, sparking and buzzing, always sensing smoke and screaming that the house of my body is on fire. They leave gaps, write a non-chronological story, break my associations and leave me disembodied, so that my sense of self becomes nonlinear, a jigsaw puzzle without the framing pieces. The before and after is gone, and so I have no creation story, only recreation, again and again. My neurons are an apple and a bite has been taken from them, exposing their soft fleshy centre and jagged edge.
I wonder how many brains will work differently after this year; how will we collectively remember this time, what stories we will write, what recreation myths will become gospel. What we will forget, and what we will remember. How there can be joy and erasure in the act of both.
—
Every cell in your body regenerates every seven years.
Every society goes through periods of destruction, of reconstruction.
If I choose to listen to my body, to stay with it, to care for it, to treat it as a whole, in four years I will have a body that has only been touched with tenderness. This will be my recreation myth.
I wonder how we will all touch each other, when we are allowed to. I wonder how we will understand each other as part of the whole.
I wonder how long the tenderness will last.
Roe McDermott is a writer, journalist, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in Journalism and an MA in Sexuality Studies from San Francisco State University, where she studied Irish women’s experiences of abortion. Roe is a columnist for The Irish Times, the film editor for Hot Press magazine and has had essays published in The Rumpus and The Coven. In 2020, Roe was awarded the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award for Literature. She is currently completing an MFA in University College Dublin and is working on her first essay collection which will explore PTSD, trauma, and patriarchal constructions of knowledge and credibility.
Saskia Jordá was born in Caracas, Venezuela and works with site-specific installations, drawings, and performances that map the tension between retaining one's identity and assimilating a foreign persona. “Having relocated from my native Venezuela to the United States as a teenager, I became aware of the layers of 'skin' that define and separate cultures—one's own skin, the second skin of clothing, the shell of one's dwelling place—all these protecting the vital space of one's hidden identity.”