I want to be touched with a tenderness that turns me into an animal—
Any animal will do. I could be a soft rabbit in your lap with a downy fur the hue of fragrant hay. I am docile. I could melt into your touch with the certainty of a long-lived safety, smooth my ears against my back and release into the sweet fingers that love my softness with the same voracity that I love to be cared for.
I could be a Capuchin monkey, a small-strange fellow who savors your exploratory touch but is unsatisfied by my own stillness. I need to touch you back. I am eased by mutual comfort. My tiny hands stroke your hair too, thrilled by the sensation of silk slipping between fingers made to search and groom and tend. We could do it to each other, you see?
Or I could be something big, a bison to your small. Your hands are a fraction of my skin. I have solid horns that can slide into your soft parts and hurt you magnificently. But I entice you anyway and I smell like winter and my fur is a bed and I don’t mind your touch, I don’t mind it at all. But the pleasure is all yours, face buried in wild down and you breathe me in like steam rising off of bitter tea. I am an animal beneath your comfort.
Or maybe, maybe I’m slick-bodied and hungry, slippery and pink, a dolphin careening beneath cutting waves. Maybe my want is bigger than just your touch. I hold you with my hunger and pull you down beneath the roiling water where it is calm and still, a floating bed to house this movement.
My touch could turn you into an animal too. We coil around one another like snakes upon the staff. Tenderness lives even when I house myself inside of you. My touch unfurls into the kind of vicious comfort that begets the slumbering sweetness of bodies not moving–but still touching.
Or. Or, or, or…Maybe I do not need the touch of another to devolve into the primal beast. Maybe it was just me all along. I’ve always been an animal and the touch turns me into more of me. I’m the animal that I am. I have fur on my head and hunger in my hips and comfort in the small of my back. Maybe the touch I need to turn tender is in my own, fingers splayed across my chest, a double-feeling. In the stark cold days of the lonely man’s winter, I’m a beast in hibernation. I am wrapped around myself in each of the possible ways. I am tough under my own tactility.
I am the animal that I am. I touch myself with a tenderness that I would use to turn another into an animal and I find it’s all the same. I am bones and you are bones and maybe we can rest together someday. All of us, we can lie together someday.
jw