There is a skin on skin feeling that is hard to quantify.

It is electric and liquid, like the air before a storm.


It tells you a path is open and the connection is flashing in your veins and under your flesh. It isn't shedding skin cells. It isn't transformative. It doesn't need to be invited but maybe it's more powerful if it is.

It isn't the snake oil you've bought and been peddling at points you've lived through and survived. It isn't anything but another step in your path, another place to rest your head, another pool in which to cool your tired feet.

It is safe, a thing all too rare. It's a little holy. It's divine, bright, numinous, a little precious.


It can also feel like a step that isn't where you thought it would be, with that catch in your stomach and the drop and adrenaline and a dash of panic and oxytocin. You're a little scared of your infatuation but the thrill seems to linger while you process that you didn't tumble down into immediate pain but the cousin of pain--vulnerability, without your normal handholds and guards. Maybe habit and the normal slings and arrows makes the taste so close in your memory that you aren't sure where to put all you're feeling. Maybe sometimes it's a sign of more to come.

But maybe sometimes it's just a little gift of healing. A little island of peace and comfort. Maybe sometime it's a chance of time and circumstance, an answer to a prayer you sent into the nothingness that's all you've found to believe. Your energy and your life and your web of love and tangles of memory, disappointment, shame, confusion--those feelings of longing blending, mimicking biology, to create, every so often, what is simply a gift.
Maybe lasting, maybe just a little treat, a little taste of what could be. Maybe sometimes, it's just what you need right then, un coup de foudre, here and then gone. And it has to be enough.