Have you ever experienced a very acute need to be touched? As one of the fundamental human senses, touch is perhaps the only one for which I actively pine. Some days it becomes a craving, and I pursue excuses to touch people. I graze someone's hand as I pass them a pen or feign obliviousness so as to bump someone on the street - hopeful that they might offer an apologetic hand on the shoulder. I feel as though I were living a Regina Spektor song, "I'm so lonely...I went to a protest just to rub up against strangers..."
It's funny how this absence of physical contact creates such a physical void within me. It becomes so palpable sometimes that I think I feel it corporeally. It's sort of like that horrible pang of heartache. You know - the sort of heartache that actually feels like a solid weight? The one that comes to be when all the loneliness you've ever felt manifests itself in your thoracic cavity?
Yeah - that one.
It's strange how a lack of physical interaction can create such a corporeal pain, and yet I know I'm not the only one who feels it so viscerally. I am, however, convinced that some have found a way of combating it. Now that I've been in France an entire month, I have been witness to such a remedy on a daily basis. I've even been the subject of it on occasion!
So what is it exactly? Well, it's that adorable little thing French people do when they greet friends - the double cheek kiss - and it's called the bise. It's not really kissing so much as brushing cheeks, and yet it fulfills an inner need for human contact. Feeling the warmth of another person so intimately is more rewarding than you might expect. A simple gesture, and yet it can stave off even the most desperate longing. Outside of Europe, people aren't comfortable with that sort of affection, and yet it is such a beautiful action. Being so close to someone else, feeling another's presence mingling with your own - that is the sort of thing that makes us human. And I, for one, find such familiarity refreshing in a day and age in which frigid glances and steel handshakes are becoming the only acceptable means of acknowledging fellow beings.
Moral of the story: Go forth and faire la bise!
(image came from this lovely website)