I'm not sure when I became the kind of person for whom it was possible to brush off closeness. Well, not brush off exactly, but become used to it, treat it like it's old hat, not write down anything about it, and generally just not dwell on it. Reading old entries of mine (old-old entries, from high school and early college) and friends' similarly old entries reminded me of how we (not all of us, but some of us) used to totally be able to obsess over the (possibly imagined) curve of someone's neck, for example, for paragraphs and paragraphs. Entries piled upon entries went to idealizing waking up in the same bed as someone, sitting by a duck pond with someone, late night driving to the beach with someone, rubbing someone's neck or their hands, the heartbreaking form of their face, the blinding perfection or whatever of the way their hips moved when they walked or something like that. This person was only sometimes a real person, and rarely did the things I obsessed about ever happen. If they had happened, I would likely have written about them once in an over-the-moon, exclamation-point-filled way, then moved on to writing idealistically about something else... something even less likely to happen.

I know this because I have had what I used to yearn for for almost five unbroken years now. I mean five almost unbroken years. There's a difference. The difference is from February to June of '07. And in that short time I was coming close to yearning again. Not quite to the point of getting my journal involved in the mess, but a hairsbreadth away, if not closer. But just because I had someone in particular in mind. If I hadn't, I don't know that I would have been that bothered. I mean, I had just gotten out of a three year relationship where closeness had ceased to be anything special at all, and had begun to be a point of contention, a source of fighting, and certainly nothing worthy of sappy journal entries. I felt jaded and couldn't believe how 18-year-old me had once swooned at the slightest touch. I saw no contradiction between this jaded feeling and the fact that I was, at that moment, sappy-journal-entrifying the specific guy I wanted, and assuming everything would be magical and wonderful with him.

The way this is heading, I'm sure you, whoever you are, have already surmised where you think the rest is going. You're probably thinking, oh, she's about to totally whine that she doesn't appreciate touch and closeness anymore even though she got the guy she sappy-journal-entrified. You're only half right.

I don't know that there's any way to protect against becoming accustomed to something, and especially for me, a spoiled only child who's used to becoming accustomed to luxuries. I went home for Christmas and was without touch for seven days. It felt merely curious. Temporary. Like I was on hiatus from my life and whatever happened on this hiatus didn't really apply to reality, so it didn't much matter what did happen. So I didn't get to the touch-idealizing part. I would have only gotten there if there had been the threat of being physical-contactless and alone forever, or at least for a good long time.

So I don't idealize touch now, that's true. I welcome it, and I like it, and I think that it is a good thing, to be as simplistic as humanly possible. But I would like to say that reading through past entries from a time when I was scared that it would never come has made me vow, at least, to appreciate it more than I already do.