Stretch out and wait 8/11/07

People talk a lot about communication, and how important that is. I agree. It's really important to communicate with the people you love (and sometimes even those you don't, I think), because it's really hard to enter each others' spaces without that. We're social animals, us humans, but we're also naturally insular, because most of our socializing happens in our brains.

Most, but not all. For us animals, some of that socializing happens physically -- kinesthetically -- sensually, and we're often blissfully (or painfully) unaware of it.

We learn each other by smell, just like animals. Newborn babies aren't able to see hours after birth; they lack the coordination and sensibility to forge a touch-recognition relationship. But within minutes, they can recognize their mother, because they know her smell. As it happens, we mothers know our little ones' smell too, because it's familiar. It's a little mysterious too, and that's why we spend so much time over them, breathing in their baby-ness.

We kiss, and remember the feel and taste of our lovers on our lips. We guage our arousal by the shiver down our backs, by the weakness in our knees, by the throbbing of our loins. We convert those feelings into love, too, because it's easier to define love kinesthetically than it is logically.

We're a feeling bunch, and we're an expressive bunch. We need to communicate, because we're socialized to do so, way down in our very DNA.

Speaking's a kinesthetic thing too. Sure, it's a mental and emotional thing, and that's why words matter. But sometimes, it's purely kinesthetic -- simply energy -- and the words just don't matter. At those times, the words almost become sacrosanct, because you can no more explain the shiver down your back in words than you can explain why you need to feel it. During those times, speaking impedes the communication, and you're better to stop.

Today was one of those days.

You ask me what I want you to say, and I tell you I don't care, because I don't. It isn't about the words, it's about the way your voice connects us - each word a thread, weaving and winding its way into the warm embrace that is one's favourite blanket. Whether or not I know the words, I can feel them, kinesthetically, because words are kinesthetic things. I ask you to speak, because the sound of your voice gives me body memory, and it lies there, dormant, waiting for me to stretch my mental body and recall it. Waiting for the time when I read words on a page, and I can hear them whispered in my ear, because they're living, breathing, kinesthetic things that have an energy all their own... a life all their own, and i can hear them and be wrapped again, if i just stretch.

Sometimes, the saying nothing at all says more than words ever could.